Consider the knot

Here I am on a writing retreat looking again at work on my essay "Untangling in front of you" (working title)

A tangled line—it might be a rope, a necklace, a sewing thread, a pile of string—comes not alone nor merely as a practical matter. Faced with a complicated tangle it can feel like something best approached without witnesses. Untangling it might involve a loss of nerve, a failure of composure, heavy breathing, a sense of rising panic. An audience of any size provides a measure of pressure heightening the possibility for irrational panic. It’s only a line curled over and looped amongst its own length. With quiet composure, a way out can be found. If panic sets in, tension lends itself toward pulling the line taut making follow through more difficult. Any practical task capable of setting one on a course toward panic carries the risk of death or serious injury or the weight of metaphor. Usually untangling a rope or string or thread or necklace is not a life or death matter and yet I can easily summon the recollection of hearing strangled cries of agony from a person struggling to untangle a line. I can envision a person trapped in a net whose struggle to get out merely tightens the knots binding them. I have seen a bird thrashing itself further into a tangle when patiently stepping away at first sensing possible entanglement might have seen the way out with little effort. It is not only a problem of human meaning making but the metaphorical possibilities of the tangle which can create a tangle in the brain that is as big an obstacle to freedom as the rope itself.

Writing is somewhat similar to untangling a length of rope. Thoughts exist in simultaneity and a curvature of relations within my thought-scape. In order to write them down and give a rational order to them I attempt to put them in a grammatical line. I struggle to do this if I do not maintain some level of calm especially through an emotional response. In that way writing might demand calm from a troubled state of mind, it might soothe a tangle of emotions, it might set into reason a confusion of if/then loops.

Consider the knot: the one that keeps the mast steady in heavy wind; the one that closes the umbilical cord; that joins two ropes together at a right angle, that, multiplied by many, comprises a bridge; that keeps a kite from flying away; that holds a ship at the dock; maintains a position at sea; measures the speed; frees a parachute from its package.

And consider its memory: A knot is a set of relations and a rope holds the memory of it equal to its investment. The tie that binds.

Artist response to the publication of Showing and Writing Training, an issue of TDPT (Routledge)

Sorry, finish your thought.

No, my thought's finished.

Well. I'm going to come back to that actually.

from the introduction: "(Not) an Editorial" by Mary Paterson and Dick McCaw Showing and Writing Training, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training – 7.2

Here you can find a link to the speakers (including me) at the launch of Showing and Writing TrainingTheatre, Dance, and Performance Training – 7.2 – Guest Editor: Mary Paterson with Training Grounds Editor: Dick McCaw (if you scroll down just a bit you'll see the players for the audio recordings).

I was asked to give an artist response to the issue at an event at Senate House which launched the issue last November (2016). Everything I was doing or saying during that presentation has a root or inspiration in the articles of that issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (which is worth a look) so though what I'm saying may sound (pleasingly or annoyingly) random, it really isn't and the key is the pieces in the issue. I do think the ideas are interesting to hear out of context--or in the context of each other or without that which they are referring to.

Two elements which may be difficult to follow without the visual are: the physical exercise which I demonstrate ("twisting your melon") and for which I speak the instruction (by Campbell Edinborough) I am following; and the bit near the end during which I ask the people in the room who have been given a piece of A4 with large words printed on them to come to the front of the room with their pages, these spell out a sentence from the editors' introduction to the issue.

You just made me think. And I think this conversation is a kind of paradigm for what a journal or any act of serious communication should be. Not making somebody think, but making them want to think.

(from the introduction: "(Not) an Editorial" by Mary Paterson and Dick McCaw, Showing and Writing Training)

Hard to know if my contribution is viable without its referent but there are other audio files from the event as well and it should make for some interesting listening (also, you could do a chore at the same time--or travel through tunnels under the city).

and sometimes the response comes a little bit later . . .

with permission from the author, this just in from the department of "I'm still thinking about it" regarding TwoFold's performance of miles & miles:

At the beginning when you were both standing on either side of a plank, you were in your places, I was comfortable with my place, then there was a moment Karen, when I saw, I believed I saw, moving across your face, a terror of precariousness, wide open, right there, child-like terror. You were standing on a precipice and there is no security. It was devastating to me. Its hard to say in words, on email, how real this was for me. I had to stop myself looking round the audience and asking ‘did you see that??!’. This was then followed by a booming question that stayed in my head for the rest of the performance ‘IS THIS REAL???’.

Karen, I’ve never seen your work before, I have had the absolute pleasure of meeting you a few times and each time you have struck me as a f*cking fabulous woman (im sorry, but sometimes swearing is necessary). I know you're not asking for feedback on yourself, but it was in watching this performance that I partly realised what is so magnetic about you, because I believe (though I can’t be sure as I know nothing about how performance actually works), it is the way you appear to live the life in you so unapologetically that made me ask if this was real.

After the performance, when you opened for discussion I told Mary Paterson my question and she talked a little about how that is what live art is often about, finding a realness. I understand this but I have very rarely ever experienced live art that felt real to me or that made me ask if what I was experiencing was real in such a sincere way. It is difficult for me to explain what that question was— ‘is it real?’. I’m not interested in trying to be smart about it.

Hearing Sophie explain the kind of structure you both worked to, a structure of gaps or holes, explained my experience of the performance. In the ‘structured’ sections I was kind of cruising, knowing my place, the ways I could enjoy the movement and patterns created, but in the gaps I felt like I was in a game where I didn’t know what would happen next. In these moments I would search your face and movements for clues and when I saw you precarious, searching, playing, lunging, I was exhilarated.

It’s like it wasn’t even about the performance, it was about you, what you were willing to open up and live, there and then.

I think you're like a wild child. One of those people whose fearlessness in life I just sit back and marvel at, because your fearlessness encompasses a willingness to experience fear. Its as though you don’t need to know where the boundaries or the safety net is, you’re going to fly out anyway to feel the cool breeze, and if you find yourself without ground beneath your feet that’s what you will live next. Of course I know that living ‘aliveness' doesn’t always feel anywhere as simple as that.

can't find the edges of Seven Falls

from the live performance of Seven Falls, May 2017, (the boat in the background is not Harry's)credit: Vanek Photography

It’s hard to know when the performance starts or when it stops. With some performance there is a very clear start and finish. There might be a long set up time but it is clearly defined and delineated and the start of the performance has a kind of click. When it is over perhaps there is a bit of disassembly required but there is never confusion or blur regarding the far limit of the show margins. But with Seven Falls, partly because it is made so quickly each time it is made, and because its making and its beginning are intermingled with the circumstances of its presentation to a larger degree than your average studio-based performance, it is hard to absolutely identify the moment when the performance of it has taken over and when it has finished passing.

It finally ended after an intermission of about a week when I tried for the second time to return the padlock key for the lock and chain that secure Harry's canoe to his barge. I went to see if he was around as I’d been carrying the key in my wallet since I returned the canoe that day after the show ceased to be an organised event in front of an assembled audience. He'd been so generous to let us use his canoe in performance, loanin git to me without having ever met me before I presented myself in front of his boat with the request of it. Now I wanted to be sure to be diligent about every aspect of the return of it to its rightful owner. I’d sent him a text enquiring about how to return the padlock key. I was hoping it was a spare—but I didn’t know that for sure. I never got an answer. After about a week I went to see him at his boat in person. When I got to where the barge had been moored it was gone.

Later that day as I rode a bike over a bridge in a different part of the canal system as I glanced to the right I glimpsed a familiar distinctive paint job. I went down to the tow path and texted from outside the boat. A message came back from Harry: Just leave the key somewhere inside the boat. With that I opened the door to his boat home and placed the key on the counter feeling part of a magical world free from worry. And as I left it there the notion hit me that now the show was finally over and that I had been the last audience member as well as the last performer to leave the stage. Some parts of the work are very very private.

Plymouth tangle

Working on an artist residency with students at Plymouth University’s School of Humanities and Performing Arts gives a glimpse into their preoccupations and thought processes. These students are having their eyes opened in various ways as a result of the courses they have embarked on and the enthusiasm is palpable in those students who are taking advantage of this moment in their lives and are, in the company of their peers, seeing with new eyes in unexpected ways.

As part of the residency I organised, students worked with combinations and permutations of material generation and methods of collaboration comprising both field and studio research. In addition they participated in sessions with invited guests: a workshop with performance writer Mary Paterson, a presentation on lighting design by Martin Langthorne, alternate modes of attention introduced by Eilon Morris through a series of polyrhythmic exercises, and appropriation of musical structure with musician Boris Hauf. One student said: “thanks for the ‘holy shit’ moment, Boris” and another “it’s like I put on glasses and now I can see.” This same effect of increased awareness and sensation and perspective shift was happening in large and small ways every day.

We engaged in practical work mixed with critical attention and reflection which work hand in hand to increase each individual’s understanding of their own discipline and their own relationship to the work of making live performance.

When a group of four asked could they use the 100-metre rope from my performance (miles & miles with Sophie Grodin) for one of their own I was delighted to agree and their own delight at the prospect of having this resource was testament to the commitment and joy they were finding in the realisation of their own ideas.

There’s plenty of cloudy thought around, and sometimes a lack of interest, but mixing theory with practice and simply getting them to try things out, more often than not, the result was an engagement with material and a new relationship to the work of making performance. My goal was to help them find ways to make work that speaks about what is important to them in particular. Through identifying their own interests they begin to discover clarity, flow, and the energy and enthusiasm needed to spark and support creative work.

TwoFold: How to keep our friends from drowning

1.Something is broken, the simultaneity is infuriating, each motion, each stutter intelligence and swindle—a martini or just water and olives. A hiccough might contain at one and the same time pathos, humour, mundanity and drama—the everyday trauma of human capacity—the beauty in a smudge and the glamour of a neck brace. This is how we got here and always with the tantalising question before us: how did they injure themselves in this way?

2.They are not broken, they are inflicted on us, they will not stop until they get it right: the explanation of how they came through the infuriating noise to settle down before us.

3.How to keep our friends from drowning takes a furious run at accelerating speeds, whiplash proof via prophylactic neck braces, wheels spin in position and we know there will be injury, the only question is how much saliva will be spent in the service of it.

4. It is desperate, it is vociferous, it is packed with an urgency I cannot explicate, their safety measures have made me suspicious, it is an extraordinary rendition, I am all ears.

Reflections after the performance, not Q & A

During the TwoFold festival we had post-show discussions after each of the studio duet double bills. The post-show discussion brings out hidden or latent significance partly because everyone has seen the work from a different point of view or set of equivalencies or preoccupations or mind climate or condition (or what have you). What one person considers obvious may not have occurred to anyone else in the room and when those present share their individual positions on the work or its effect these ideas begin to spark associations whether in concert with or in contrast to what is expressed by others.

It is important to me that people feel they can speak about their impressions because these impressions are the specific currency of the work. Sometimes they are based in intellectual ideas, sometimes they are based in emotion or sensation, sometimes they simply spark a memory and articulating this becomes a way of reading not only the piece observed but also for the observer to become more conscious of their own observations and how they might be slanted by their own filters. We come together over the ways that we agree or disagree about what happened in the room. Also about how these differences do not describe right or wrong, only difference. For this reason it is important not to think of the post-show discussion as a question and answer session.

Those of us who have made the work and shown it on a particular occasion do not hold the key to its significance. All we can do is talk about our own point of view. Our point of view is an intimate one, coming from within the making process as it does, but it is not a privileged position, it is equal to and mixed in with the views from the bodies of the audience. As makers we learn what we have done from the audience. We know what we THINK we have done but it only becomes clear when we hear back from those who can see it from the outside. And they always see something other than what we have understood about the work before showing it.

In order to protect the audience point of view I often refuse to answer a question until the questioner has spoken a bit about the subject (or object) of their question so that we (both makers and viewers) understand what is driving the question and why this particular area within the material is of interest to the questioner. This draws out the discussion and makes clear the importance of individuals' concerns and thought processes. This is a bit tricky in practice, especially if the question is challenging the work or seems to suggest a fault on the part of the performance makers. I usually attempt a friendly counter question. If the question is something like: “why are you making that line on the floor?” I say something like: “I will answer your question but first can you tell me what it makes you think of, or why you think we are doing it?” It may require a bit more back and forth but before long it always transpires that the questioner knows a lot about what the significance of the line might be and sometimes knows something that had not occurred to those of us who made the piece. It feels important to make sure that this intelligence from the mind of a viewer is protected and brought out for everyone to consider.

I suppose sometimes these thoughts are only just forming in the mind of the viewer as the question is turned back to them and this feels exciting to me. Sometimes, in my own experience, the parts I have questions about or think I don’t understand have caught my attention precisely because they are the very things that are speaking to me—it’s just that I don’t quite understand what they are saying until I put my focus there and attempt to communicate a question or simply form a sentence about the material that has caught my attention (or bothered me).

In addition to hearing from the audience, particular people with experience thinking and writing about performance have always been helpful as part of the process. The work of articulating sensations and of drawing lines between the work presented and the world of associations it links to improves with practice and over time. For this reason we welcome hearing from people who write about performance work. We regularly invite written response from performance writers and critics.

Mary Paterson was asked to write an overview (link to come) of the TwoFold festival of duet performances and this helps us make connections that we as makers are too close to the work to see for ourselves. After the final event of the festival I was exhausted and feeling somewhat chagrined that the final event was not as well attended as I would have liked. I had quipped to the audience that it almost felt like a performance in my living room for a set of friends. The event was a pair of performance-lecture-type presentations (see here) one of which was from a private performance that Rajni Shah and I performed weekly over a period of four years. Afterwards, Mary Paterson, who had been in the audience, commented that it was an interesting inversion that took place: a public event that felt private (due to the small number of viewers) and a private performance made public. It was a simple observation but the act of speaking that observation aloud gave a meaning to what took place that I would not have seen without her being there and making that statement. This articulation clarified something for me and sparked ideas that joined with other ideas around the subject of public and private.

What I’m saying is that I learn so much from other people’s observations.

TwoFold: So Below

Photo: Manu Valarce Photography 2017

(in the style of a headstone text)In loving memory of our old performance not seen for the past four years but not forgotten though some parts may have faded. Brought to us in a former time out of nothing we here this day come back to it now and see it for what it was and see the changes that a new time brings to it. Born 2011, with us for all too short a time.

It was fine to bring it back. It was a worthy task. I found that our old habits and failures with it were still intact. We can’t remember those steps or I always remember that bit wrong and as usual Gerard is better at remembering than I am. I don’t want to say that I’m lazy. But there is some part of my brain that wants to leave a space for chance and for falling but sometimes that means I’m in limbo and sometimes that means I am failing or sloppy. Sometimes it means I am heart broken.

Some of it didn’t translate through the time gap and had to be rehydrated. We found ourselves wondering why did we did it this way and whether we should hold on to that or figure it out anew.

It is as though it Fell asleep while we carried on to other works waking up this March eve to fill the room with earth and water.

We miss her smile, her cheery way,We miss the things she used to say,And when old times we oft recallIt’s then we miss her most of all.

TwoFold: Holding

part of Holding OPEN presentation 11 March @ Chisenhale

contributions from Rajni Shah were read by Lucy Cash as Rajni was in Australia, the following is one of my contributions sat and written for delivery on the occasion of this presentation of Holding OPEN

Feb 3rd 2017, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides

the wind is fierce and the ticking of the clock a prominent voice

50 min stillness and silence 20 min writing

he was a catalyst, witness-less Sometimes his enthusiasm was not matched. He was a catalyst but with a faulty ticker. Sometimes he got the chronology wrong. He toasted the “roof we are under” and lived most of his life on the same island, in the same town, on the same street, in the same house. The house he died in. The house where the wind blows hard against stone walls and the water finds a way in and a soft tapping in the eaves continues all night long. The wind is a tangler, the sun smoothes it all down, the water lends a texture and the coal gives an odour to the smoke that is irresistible. He never smelled what I smelled. His nose was for the wine and for the apple a day and for keeping the doctor at bay. His nose was for the history of it. His nose was for adding lead to the petrol because these old cars can’t run without it. We had to stop driving at all to give a counterbalance to the consumption in his corner. You don’t stop loving a person because they use their time differently, would rather smell the oil than the roses, can’t seem to see it your way, won’t turn the heat up when they are dying of the cold—you don’t stop loving someone because they went away or stopped talking to you, or died. But the wind is a tangler and in this howling wind everything is tangling I can’t find the beginning. And me, here, the one who likes chronology, likes to fiddle with it until it wakes my own sense, the one I want it to do, my truth, in my own order. The story was predictable but some want to look back for the truth while others see it forward. I want to shift it and watch it change as the details are revealed in waves reconstruction pollutes the knowing and brings the foresight together with the hindsight and mixes the details in a three-part pot.

He was so appreciative of a hot meal, a fresh cake, a new loaf of bread, a soup on the stove top. Everyday magic. The secret handshake, the special rules, the roof we’re under. I always wanted a father, but not necessarily the one I had. It isn’t a choice though is it. He’s wrapped in a shroud, wrapped himself in it to tell me the same stories over and over again, out of the ward and into the drafty hallways of the hospital, he wanted to sit where he could speak freely. All he did from there was pretend he was famous one more time. Cast as the journalist begging for an exclusive I watched him live via hospital corridor, sheet shrouded captured on my phone, eye glinted and cuddled in three-square meals without lifting a finger. Clam happy and drunk with his own circulating fluids.

I’ve bent the two fathers—one should really only ever have one, they begin to confuse each other. One I know is dead nearby, the other most likely. though not definitely, alive far away. What makes either of them dear is me.

The TwoFold festival of duets was dedicated in memory of Ian Mitchell of Stornoway.

Link to other entries on or from Holding OPEN, a private duet with Karen Christopher and Rajni Shah, here

TwoFold: the particularities of working in pairs

This second symposium on duet work that we have been part of (see here for posts on the earlier one) was held at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre on 3rd and 4th March 2017 and included presentations by the following:

It could begin with this:A panel where three people from different vantage points talk about something in relation to doubles or twins or a set of two somethings.

It could begin with this: two people are like two strands comprising a rope which holds together by the pressure of the twist of contradictory forces, without which, it is just fibres reduced to gossamer, easily lost to the wind.

It could continue like this:A couple of police officers tell us all about how they work together to complement each other’s strengths. In a kind of good cop bad cop routine.

It could continue like this, comfortable with the fact that I will never truly know you.

It could end like this:A large thunderclap is heard from the sky, and everyone rushes to the windows to watch the largest hail stones they have ever seen falling to the ground. As we look closer, we see that each of the hail stones is really two hail stones, fused together.

We welcome you to TwoFold - the particularities of working in pairs.We have been thinking in two’s for about 6 years now and wanted to widen the dialogue. We think this will be an opportunity to do that with all of you.

What followed (the allure of the evil twin and the dread it expresses; the non-local entangled pairs, the embrace of randomness, the thought experiment in which action here determines reality there; the sound of something meeting resistance; the deep resource of misunderstanding—conflict as a methodology; the duo in which practice comes first (in silvery outfits) in a dovetailing relationship with theory; wrapped up the next morning by a list of questions and the notion that working with another person is a struggle to articulate yourself as well as the other person and that entanglement is not about ignorance but about randomness; followed by sticky navigation, a set of relations that make an understanding: the fix is not finding an answer but in realising the problem is unsolvable; a man and his mirror; a dog and her girl and their dancing shadows; the scaffold upon which their work is made: step, feather, stitch, a game with cards; Homeworks, the interpenetration of work and home, each other; the blue masking tape at the height of 133cm from the floor turning the studio into the study transforming simultaneity from a temporal to a terrestrial state; and then all of us in a room with something to say but hardly any words to say it with) came in such a tumble it was hard to keep it in a straight line but when it was over we knew more as well as had more to know. It was not a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. Everyone got more.

without restriction to a particular way of thinking

The duet form as a topic brings us together without restriction to a particular way of thinking. It allows for disparate styles, poetics, aesthetics--as a central focus it does not dictate type in these categories.

a report on the TwoFold symposium

Mary Paterson wrote a response to the first day of the symposium, a thought-provoking list of questions and hearing it on the second day had the effect of moving from white noise to a spot on the radio dial assigned to a specific station. Reading it later I realised it developed (intentionally or not) an exchange from the end of the first day provoked by the above statement having been uttered aloud.

Someone took exception to the above statement claiming we were all pretty similar. I suggested that was not the case from my point of view, which was countered by another voice saying well, we probably all voted remain . . . (or something to that effect). Mary's writing rescues us from the reductive and not-quite-rigorous morass of half thoughts that intermingled in that late moment when a group discussion was just taking shape. It was a moment when we might take stock of what had happened during the day if there were any among us with enough focus left to find a thread through it. It was more like turning up earth in service of future growth rather than fashioning fully formed conclusions on the day. A little time and germination will no doubt pull some thoughts together. Mary's writing helps in that regard.

Mary's questions sparked by her attention to the way things proceeded through that first day reads as a rigorous questioning of method, intention, or procedure and points to a climate of attention that coheres in a room of people examining their own practices one after another, in pairs, all day long. It also makes a kind of coded message which reads one way to the people who had been present for the day and another to those readers who weren't there. And within those two categories of reader (the one from inside the symposium day and the one from outside), the open weave of it allows meaning to be constructed in collaboration with the various positions and preoccupations of readers from both audiences. It both guides and conforms, clarifies and confounds. These are questions we all benefit from answering no matter where we are and no matter what we are doing.

from Questions about Two Fold by Mary Paterson

Who’s missing? How do you know? What shape do they make with their absence? Will you start again when they get here? Will you feel complete? Will you feel better? What’s your position?

Who is your opposite? Who is your complement? What does your reflection say back to you from the mirror? Be honest: how long do you like to spend talking to yourself in the mirror? And how long would you like to do it if no-one was watching? And how long would you like to do it if you could guarantee that people were watching, avidly, in silence, and theorising it later on in company as the performance of an alter ego?

What kind of moral licence could you achieve from dividing up your psyche into the other versus the self, the organised versus the active, the repressed versus the carnivalesque, the curator versus the artist? What authority do you have when you give yourself a job title? Is ‘collaborator’ a job title? Is ‘partner’? Is ‘scientist’? Is ‘dyad’? Is it a compliment?

What’s your word for it? Relatively speaking: what’s your position? What’s your super-position? How do you know you’re not missing any information? How do you know you’re not drowning in misunderstanding? What kinds of freedoms could you achieve when you know that entanglement is not to do with ignorance, but to do with randomness?

Mary Paterson's response was written for and delivered on the second day of TwoFold: the particularities of working in pairs, a symposium hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Camden People’s Theatre as part of TwoFold, Haranczak/Navarre’s festival of duet performance (March 2017). The symposium was followed by two weekends of duet performances at Chisenhale Dance Space (London).

end of the year letter, never sent

end of the year letter 2016elections / endings / moment of clarity / connections

moment of clarityThe materials were essential. The fact of the rope, its properties, told us the story. When the end came undone it was because the twist was lost—the contradictory turns in either direction which held them curled tight around each other. The attempts to go in, the tendency towards, opposite directions kept the strands together. Suddenly I realised the whole 100 metres of rope could come undone. I went to the chandlers and had an old hand whip both ends with a sailmaker’s whipping and saved the rope.

electionsWe were at opposite ends of the hallway. 6am. She said, “we’re out” I said “I saw that.” A quiet moment, we stopped. She said you know what this means don’t you. I said, what? Now Trump is going to be president of the United States. Never. And we each went back into our rooms. I looked out the window. The tree was still there and the tall grasses. I decided to go out and see the perfectly round drops of dew which I predicted would be balanced on each blade. I had plans to take pictures this time.

endingsAnd I take a nap and when I wake up he is still dead and when I have a cup of tea, when the timer goes off, when I’ve finished the book, when the rubbish is collected when the fishermen wake in the morning he will still be dead. I am tired. I am weary. I could sleep for a thousand years.

connectionseverywhere

Posted on Saturday, 31 December 2016 by Karen Christopher

[Norwegians for Rod Stewart]

set for the wrong channel -- expectation disappointed is a coach making a three-point turn on a narrow mountain road

a group of five people sit in the row behind usthe drunken sounding septuagenarian says “we are Norwegian” his exuberance embraces and repels he is saying hello to everyone who passes he is making a good time, he is feeling his way to it his way of speaking sounds drunken or he is drunk or both.

He says “we came from Norway to see Rod Stewart but he was cancelled so we are here instead.”

Here is London, here is a Kings Cross theatre tent, here is Lazarus, an idea of a musical, a David Bowie brainchild, a kind of Broadway attempt to continue the man who fell to earth. It’s a sequel to a film. A piece of style. Not a concert. Not raspy, not rowdy. Not particularly loud. Our Norwegian friend sings along when he knows the words: ch-ch-ch -changes. He also knows Heroes: “I will be King, and you, you will be Queen . . .” and he knows when to say “like dolphins can swim” garrulous, he is garrulous, “a garrulous old man who chattered like a magpie,” excessively talkative.

Otherwise it is quiet back there, too quiet. And his disappointment becomes mine.

we started it some time ago and it doesn't seem to stop

This just in from Teresa Brayshaw: This image created from our actions unleashed into the world and we have no will over it. Indeed we have no will to have one. Not our idea nor anyone's. We found something to pluck and we plucked it and the photo from 3 years ago is now beckoning young people into a theatre school in Bilbao. This is not what we intended but it is what we always intend. When we performed this piece in Cardiff last year that is not the photo we wanted used for publicity. It was chosen for us from among the ones taken a festival before. We offered no resistance even though we thought there was a better one. One in which the local humans looked a bit more enthusiastic. Now here it is again. I suppose I haven't much to say about it. Just there it is. That photo like a bad penny. Or a sweet reminder.

Untangling in front of you

After performing our new duet miles & miles at Chisenhale Dance Space in July I became transfixed by a couple of questions: How did we untangle in front of you? How could we trust it was something to watch? Isn't untangling a knot something about which you say "I can't do this if I'm watched"? The untangling of a rope or string or other line or set of lines can be one of the most panic inducing dilemmas there is. Why would I want to play it out in real uncontrollable time in front of an audience.

The untangling is an unquestionable by-product of the forces and concerns we are laying out in miles & miles. Something about the attempt at linearity or organisation of a sense of life and its uncontrolability is at the heart of our performance work.

To reorganise a stream of consciousness unleashed into the world merely by being alive is almost an impossible task.

Undoing a knot is the kind of thing that might produce the declaration (even to friendly onlookers): I can't do this in front of you.

The pressure of another's gaze is unsettling to the mind of the untangler. Furthermore, what might be streamlined for one person to sort out becomes precarious with two as each sees the knot or tangle from a different point of view. The binocular aspect is just enough to tip the apple cart. But as we do work in tandem, we must exercise the capacity to refrain from turning on each other like over-heated rats in a crowded cage. And this is how we kept our nerve, by knowing there is a future to survive together.

. . . this will eventually be completed as an essay including (but not limited to) the following sections: the whole body through the loop, the performance of confidence & optimism, the technical terms we feigned to make it seem we were in control, and the vicarious thrill for the audience of our ultimate victory.

The Things They Do

The Things They Do was a one-day symposium (29th July 2016) coinciding with the Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition that is on right now (through beginning of September) at the Barbican in the main gallery. A number of artists made responses to the invitation from Joe Kelleher, Nick Ridout and Orlagh Woods:

The Things They Do is inspired by Kjartansson’s interest in making art out of the things that other people do.

In Kjartansson’s work the appropriation of these practices – like painting seascapes or playing in a rock band – involves a complex mixture of absolute seriousness and inevitable pretence, of sincerity and the ridiculous. Each of these practices is at once revivified, even as they are presented as somehow already used up and exhausted, by the contemporary artist’s own longing – but self-aware – investment in them.

Our plan is that during the course of the day a selection of artists, writers and academics will offer a series of performances, demonstrations, talks and other activities, in which they share their investments in the things that other people do and their experiences of learning to do these things themselves.

Judith Butler Gets a Sip and Drinks ItIn the midst of giving a lecture (Precarious Life: the Obligations of Proximity) at the Nobel Museum in Sweden, American philosopher Judith Butler takes 1 minute and 28 seconds to open a bottle of water and take a sip. This performance repeats that performance over and over again.

A number of artists performed other acts simultaneously, durationally, at specific times, just once, and repeatedly over a couple of hours or just a couple of minutes inside the conservatory which is usually closed to the public except on Sundays and bank holidays if there isn't a private event going on.

Here below in the form of a thank you letter is a short description of my experience of it:

Dear Joe, Orlagh, and Nick,Your symposium set up quite a few mechanisms for inspiring creative thought including: doing things in front of people; performing simultaneous actions both individually and with others in a large permeable series of subspaces; drawing disparate elements together; spending time watching and listening; experiencing space and proximity through sound; allowing one thing to bleed with others; listening, watching, and doing in order to think in alternate ways or to bring thoughts into the brain as a result of avenues other than speaking or writing or sitting alone.

Joe, I think I lied to you. It was a lie of fatigue and over-focus and a lie of confusion brought on by the chemistry of my body. Referring to Judith Butler you said: did she really take such a long drink? (*see note below) I said “yes.” and at the same time suddenly realised that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t actually true. I think the length of the drink grew as I performed the action and this is always what happens once a performer gets hold of something and finds a resting place or a hook or a hollow spot that can be filled. This performer (I) also accidentally saw (the day before the symposium) a slow motion version of this drink before realising it was a slow motion version (both are on my phone). I had a growing thought “I didn’t realise she invested so much in the enjoyment of that break” that moment seemed so important. But it was a mistake. Just after that thought I realised I’d started the wrong clip. But somehow the long drink was not erased from my foremost conscious version of the segment. This married with the piano music of Emma in the background of my second position in the conservatory and I took a performer’s license to exaggerate (I always carry this license with me). When I answered yes to your question, Joe, I heard it and realised it as incorrect as I said it. But that was a bit difficult to explain in that moment. I was just realising for the first time that I’d seduced myself into thinking the drink was that long. But it was the most important part. Your question brought this realisation out. For me there’s a lot there. That’s why we talk about things isn’t it.

Stop exaggerating. My mother used to say. You are so histrionic. To which I responded: I have to exaggerate because you weren’t there and you don’t have the full feeling of being there (you just have me telling it) so the exaggeration brings you closer. Nonsense.

I felt very well cared for Orlagh—even if everything was a bit rushed and tumbling at the beginning when the workers who might have carried water or set up sound seemed a bit ellusive—I felt everything would go well because if someone else didn’t do it, you would see it done. I found it hilarious after watching a number of people fumbling in the Garden room with the video screen and its glare and wondering what to do about it, you breezed in and simply pushed it back a bit. Of course. It was much better.

Nick, the twist of your eyebrows and the up-turned edges of your mouth told us all we needed needed to know about the frame of mind with which we would be promenading through the day: a lark, a serious linger, a consideration, entertainment. CJ pointed out his favourite comment of the day, it was something like: “And lunch will be a classic one hour.” (everyone laughed) Your classic delivery carried it off with aplomb. The underlying message: we are looking at everything today.

Only a handful of people saw my third section over there by the pond (and the gent’s toilet), three of them were you three. It was a sudden highlight for me. I suddenly realised you had to steal a moment away but possibly this little moment (which might have felt obligatory) could open up a rest within the confines of obligation, the proximity to me meant you were still doing your “work” which for reasons we all know (some to do with repetition) was not too demanding at that moment. It isn’t going to change only “I” will. A known quantity allowing a hollow place. A break within the classic one hour lunch. Next to the carp and the pond. Only a couple of others ventured back there during my time in that position but I was conscious of the sound I was providing even from the other side of the Conservatory and this wouldn’t have occurred to me had I not had a few iterations all alone (and getting it “right” finally when no one was watching). If the sound of my voice and the rhythm it was carrying and the familiarity of its short message was still sounding in the room it was enlarging the space we were all in together. Later in the Garden room after lunch as Laure was speaking and I could hear Emma playing, the thought came back to me and I was feeling the shape of the conservatory through the sound that travelled through it to us there in the rows of seats.

OK, that’s too long already.

What I meant to say was thank you. Thanks for the invitation to participate which was, of course, an invitation to think. The freedom you allowed within the remit you set out set off a multiplicity of actions in response and this felt relaxingly fruitful in the department of thought.

Cheers,Karen

*note: the length of the "drink" discussed here is the actual moment of lips to glass, water entering mouth. The preparation, glass bottle opening (with metal top opener), and water pouring into drinking glass etc took 1min 28secs. But the sip of water entering the mouth part itself was elogated by 1.5 to 2 secs in the performance of it (artistic license KC15041963).

Green Letters

Sophie Grodin and I wrote "On Creating a Climate of Attention: the composition of our work” an essay which appeared in Performance and Ecology: What Can Theatre Do? a special performance issue of the journal Green Letters; studies in ecocriticism (Volume 20 issue 3, 2016) guest edited by Deidre Heddon and Carl Lavery. Here is an excerpt from notes for our introductory section:

As a starting directive we give ourselves the goal of listening and of sensing the environment in which we find ourselves. We are conscious that the conditions around us will be feeding into what the work becomes. The interaction between us creates a climate which will influence the work and its aesthetic. We are conscious that collaborative devising relies on a sensitivity to the ecology we are part of as the work is being made. Which is to say to the totality or pattern of relations between the organisms involved and our environment. There are some features of this that support the work and there are some that we face as challenges to the work but engaging with these features becomes the warp to the weft of what we are able to make. We begin with a kind of open intention and we finish a work with fine tuning it to suit a set of specific intentions but in the vast middle area of the devising process we are struggling to find the best way to interact with our immediate environment and most of all we are listening and observing what is possible within the parameters given. We have to find the balance between having an idea and uncovering what is there. We have to see ourselves as part of nature, as equal partners with the natural world we find ourselves surrounded by, even if that is a human-made construction. We might see ourselves as gardeners but we also see that the gardener is part of the garden.

I’ve tried to say this is how we have made what we have made. But how do I know how it happened? I was there but I was not able to see it as I was it. I was the subject as much as I was the maker. And I was always trying to understand why I thought in the wiggly line I was thinking in. Where was the straight line? was there a straight line? or was it more of a way that one of us was able to stop following a random path and follow instead a line of intention, a line that connected one part to another in an unbroken trajectory of unfolding meanings? Unfolding meanings. Sometimes one is simply writing to find the way forward and when this results in only one good line in a whole day of writing, well, so be it. It is not far from the tactics of the cherry tree. The cherry tree generates millions of blossoms creating a multitude of seeds most of which never propagate the species but nevertheless feed the birds and the bees and countless other creatures in the vicinity.

Alternation becomes a way forward. Sometimes you have to zigzag to find the path up or down. After watching Watermark, the film by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky we wanted to explore the properties of water. In Watermark there are many examples of the ways water behaves in a landscape. We poured water on the floor and watched it follow the path of least resistance.

There it is, a little trickle of an attempt to tell how we create or pay attention to the ecology around us during the making process. We are working with what we can pull out of the air, a kind of wild yeast that feeds on the flour and makes the bread rise.

"This article explores how two performance makers – Karen Christopher and Sophie Grodin of the company Haranczak/Navarre – approach the rehearsal process as an ecological practice in and by itself. Drawing attention to such things as listening, openness and patience, Karen and Sophie explore how their devising strategy transcends the studio and becomes a form of relating to the world in general. Karen and Sophie illustrate their ideas by drawing on generative metaphors and by grounding their insights on their empirical experience of making Control Signal (2013) and miles & miles (2016). In the article there is an attempt to extend the dialogic nature of Haranczak/Navarre’s work into the editing process, to create, that is, an extended climate of attention." editors' note

If you are interested in our essay but can't get your hands on a copy of Green Letterslet me know.

Green Letters, Performance and Ecology: What Can Theatre Do? was published online summer 2016.

Coming to the end of the making

Free floating anxiety and a tremulous feeling in the legs or chest possibly a tight forehead. Only some of the symptoms of this stage in the process. Finality is chilling. It’s like a death rehearsal. My eye wanders during lunch at a table in the studio to a page we were writing on yesterday—the word “worried” has been written with a box around it.

We are not good enough to show it but we show it anyway—hard to do—but also hard to know it if we don’t show it. We have to live with the pain.

lost threads, found threads, dropped threads, threadbare

And I tell myself: I have an idea. But when I think about it the place where I am and everything that has just happened (immediately and in the past) has led to this moment. It's maybe not my idea or not just mine and maybe it's not that I have it, it is possible that it has me.

And then the landscape becomes more than an idea to me, it becomes me as there is no difference between me and idea. Constructs of the mind are only as stable as the mind and only as rigid.

And it is this that leads to the audience coming on stage: dissolving boundaries, the difference between, foreground/background confusion, stability shifts toward something not yet grounded, unmoored but trusting.

And then a condition of my life intervenes in the form of something like a dream--except that it is really happening--but happening with a twilight version of myself only half fueled and being taken care of. And then it really becomes clear that I never do anything alone even if I think I do.

And (in this twightlight condition) I looked to the right where the painted portrait hangs and there was a portrait but not the real portrait, it was the wrong shape and colour. And I looked beyond my feet to where the window should be and there was a window but it was bigger than the usual window, my window, the one I always look to. And I looked to my left where the door would be and it was much too far away. A replica of a room I recognise but I didn’t have a self myself and there was a nice man there who looked at me but I didn’t know him. He said: “don’t worry, after awhile you’ll understand.” I believed him. There was no urgent need to leave this replica of a room. I had no alternate destination in mind. I waited.

Now there's no audience coming onstage but I am there and Sophie and also the idea of not us and no decision and multiple endings and never solid and possibly not knowing our names--or at least me not knowing mine. Nevertheless, we go on.

miles & miles still ending

Below is a fragment of free-writing (mine) from a gallery trip Sophie and I took in the finalising days when we were struggling to see where the piece (miles & miles) should land. We went to the National Gallery and placed ourselves in the vicinity of particular paintings with a directive to observe for a period of time and then free-write for a period of time. We were trying to loosen our minds but always in connection with finding an answer to the question “How do we end?”. The gallery was very busy and our observation included the whole room surrounding the painting we placed ourselves in proximity to.

To the promised edge, the reward, the conclusion, the absence of floor, the fall: don’t rush. To the sneeze give everything. Take the boy to the painting and allow him to stare. Take a photo for later. Run across the gallery in trainers and your noisy jacket tied around your waist. Taste the lemon. What is the sound: high giggle, shoe squeak, shoe scuff, the hinge whines full and in fragments, there was a loose ball bouncing and a pram wheel. Plastic bag noise. Tapping of soft shoes.

A rush of wings he fell 36 feet from the grid where he had been an angel hanging. When they came to rescue him he said I’m warning you, I’m naked under here. It was then they saw the wings. This was their first rescue of this kind.

We made this world. If I wish to be undone I can be, if I wish to feel afraid this is also possible. Blindness is easy even with eyes that see. I don’t have to feel a thing. This is this if I say it is. I can plant an idea I can precipitate change. I can imagine it before it happens I can remember it differently. The people walked in a line, this made them lose their way. Most of them had only seen the person in front of them. But there was another line that walked across miles with 60 seconds between each walker and when the lightning hit it only came down where there wasn’t one. The dream became the place where I could fall.

Some people learn to solve the fall by flying, others by letting themselves land and, finding nothing, never dream the fall again. The fall doesn’t kill you the dream does.

finding the end

this is an excerpt from writing done during our Roehampton DTP residency to finish work on the performance duet miles & miles (this past January)—and we still aren’t really finished—the next deadline is coming up and is backed up by an imminent performance (7th & 8th July 2016, Chisenhale Dance Space)

A resolve has settled in, both a kind of clarity about what has to be done today and a realisation of the limitations a day includes, here, with us, in this room. We are finishing. We are finishing finishing. There’s a special setting on my brain for when the end is near. Maybe there’s more than one option for this setting. Maybe one of them is a kind of panic which produces wild-eyed blindness. Another is a wistful acknowledgement of the limits we face. We have only come this far thus far and the likelihood that we can see the edge is becoming more and more real. It is possible that the unknown possibilities—including dizzying brilliance as well as dim disappointment—are blinking out like spent candles. It is in this moment that we, giggling, came upon a plan to tell ourselves everything was still possible. But how do you fool yourselves when even imagination feels bounded by reality, even if that reality is one manufactured by yourselves?

Let us say we have determined that our show is using a central metaphor or analogy or visual image, surely the possible endings must come in line with the trajectory that springs from this central post, this guiding principle . . . or maybe anything is possible.

miles & miles, the end game

Sophie and I were talking about anchors and how the anchor between us might be activated this leaked into the free-writing I did as part of our trip to the National Gallery.

The other as anchor, the anchor as safety as well as burden, something which allows you to take risk while remaining safe, wander while always being able to return home. The other as facilitator, lift, burden sharing, hinderance, weight, burden, The unit of two as both duality and duplication, divided and combined. The space between us. The holes are the space between, the spot of broken communication. Alone together, never alone, in each others business, never feeling quite right together or apart. The risk is what? the risk is cut in half by two, the risk is multiplied by two. What is the line? What makes the line? How are borders formed? What makes the margins dissolve? It’s about dissolving margins—how do the margins dissolve and is this what creates the holes? What distinguishes one thing from another ?—is it not one strand a never ending flux? Where do I end and you begin? How is the now and when is it later? If this is perfect why should I go on? If I fracture this moment does it increase the pieces of future moments? How many possible endings? Continuation. What do I live for —how long do I prepare—if I cannot do it alone can I do it with other people? When does the onflow cease? When is there a pause in the continuum? If there isn’t how do we identify and distinguish between things what if I become part of the scenery, one with the universe—how do I find an edge—where is a vantage point? How can I gain perspective? What is my name if I don’t know what lost means it can’t happen to me. The more I learn or think about the more that can happen within my experience—the moment I learn about the existence of a new fruit the more likely I am to see it.

And then the landscape becomes more than an idea to me it becomes me as there is no difference between me and idea. Constructs of the mind are only as stable as the mind and only as rigid.

Rule the World beats The Last Samurai

I’ve spent months looking for a sign. In this period of searching for the end everything starts talking to me about it: my dreams, street traffic, people in the park or the underground, the mail that comes through the slot in the door, the birds in the sky, the noise the refrigerator makes, the news of the world. I was minding my own business with the usual background noise of the morning radio mingling with the usual background reference points located within the performance I am working on when I heard the statement: Rule the World beats The Last Samurai to win the grand national. I didn' tuse it in anyway other than to realise how sensitised I was to listening and processing everything that comes through my ears. It's exhausting. It's sparkling and shimmering. Sometimes it's a trap.

Here’s a roundup from the Telegraph which sets out how the race ended for each horse and rider:

Finally, here is how everyone else got onHadrian’s Approach unseated rider at firstFirst Lieutenant fell at secondHolywell fell at secondThe Romford Pele unseated rider at eighthRocky Creek pulled up at 12thSilviniaco Conti pulled up at 14thOn His Own fell at 15thSir Des Champs fell at 15thThe Gallant Oscar unseated rider at 18thBallynagour unseated rider at 19thSoll pulled up at 21stThe Druids Nephew pulled up at 21stHome Farm pulled up at 21stBlack Thunder pulled up at 21stKatenko fell at 22ndNoston Bob pulled up at 22ndAachen pulled up at 22ndOnenightinvienna unseated rider at 22ndWonderful Charm pulled up at 24thDouble Ross pulled up at 26thKruzhilinin pulled up at 27thBallycasey unseated rider at 29thSaint Are pulled up at 30thThanks for following with us, hope you had fun. Cheers.

consciously setting up a series of conversations

A fleeting conversation makes for a long podcast. Or how long is a short one? what length it should be? Chris Goode has a series of them and they are all around an hour long. Here is a link to the conversation between him and me. You might drink it all at once or in several gulps separated in time. However you do it I hope you enjoy being a fly on our wall.

importing an audience once in a while

a report fragment from our 3-day residency at Roehampton to work on finishing miles & miles

We just have to rehearse this little part and then run the whole section that it comes from. We just need to work this middle bit because the built in looseness of it means that we have to know it very well. It’s hard to convince yourself sometimes that you should learn something that might not even work, that you have to work on it long enough to get good at it and then maybe throw it out. Working on it can make it difficult to throw it out later. You might get attached to it.

She said you have to have dinner with each other in order to be able to pop in and out of just talking to each other and performing the material. She meant it was hard to say where the parts when we were us performing and parts when we were us performing being just us talking. The pressure of it, the pressure of the gaze puts us in an it moment. A moment when it might happen, a moment when the material finds its velocity, its time and place—where something takes shape, gathers a weight. A performance needs an audience in order to be a performance. Even an audience of one counts as an audience. That’s where a director comes in handy—a director is always an audience of the piece. As we are both directing and both in it we have no regular audience. that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are in trouble, it means we need to supply that dynamic in a different way. This means importing an audience once in a while. It means bringing in a series of outside eyes. It means subjecting ourselves to the scrutiny of another’s gaze. The energy of the gaze is a kind of compression the gives us the right climate in which to work. It gives us a pillowcase for all of these feathers. These feathers turn into birds and fly away. These thoughts lead to other thoughts and this is the way we develop a train of thoughts—that pathway through our possible trajectories helps clarify direction and limit choices. The reality of sequence or chronology is that it has one kind of grammar in the brain with a kind of dreamlike shorthand of simultaneous knowings and another kind of grammar in the reality outside of our heads which adheres to a kind of linearity associated with speech and writing and the qualities of physical matter. The idea of being hit by a bus vs the actual bus making impact with your own soft body.

This is an invitation to sit still and do nothing.This is an invitation to a workshop.This is an invitation to share silence.This is an invitation to hear about a process.This is an invitation to a performance.This is an invitation to sit together, with intention.This is an invitation to a kind of hovering.

This is an invitation to witness and be part of and hear about a private duet that Rajni Shah and Karen Christopher have been engaging in for the past 49 months. We would like to tell you about it, but the only way we can think of to do this is to invite you inside it.There will be tea and cake.Everyone is welcome. It is free of charge.Please let us know in advance if you are coming.

Here is part of the introduction to the event:

We will gather. We will sit with intention. We will not engage in progress. We will hold still. Stasis, a kind of hovering to let moments catch up and slow down. Quiet the mind. We will be still and silent. We will not ry to breathe or organise thoughts, we will float we will not identify what is important we will not make decisions we will gently corral out thoughts back to zero when they begin to become productive. We are always trying—in this case we try not to try too hard, a gentle try.

A possibly activity: make a wish, write it down. make two more and write them.Choose one of them to focus on. Let a words associated with your wish standout—just one word. Write the word 3 times in three different ways. How does it appear before you? This word will help you focus back to neutral when you notice your mind has wandered. It is not neutral of course. But nothing is. So we will endow this word with the power of bringing us back to a beginning. the goal is not to progress but to stay at the beginning. Hover at the starting gate. Everything is still possible.

collaboration, surprise, and mayhem

The duet residencies

From Contemporary Theatre Review's 'Interventions' page:

Reflections on what makes an ideal artist’s residency, with reports on two residencies I undertook at the University of Roehampton in London in early 2015: one with Chris Goode, another with Lucy Cash.

A post from the workroom

During September 2015, I have been working as an ensemble member of Chris Goode & Co, as we make the new performance Weaklings: "Inspired by and loosely based on the notorious blog of writer and artist Dennis Cooper, Weaklings disorientingly blurs fiction and documentary, fact and fantasy, to create a compelling portrait of people on the edge, finding a strange refuge together in dangerous times."

considering the audience

I’m trying to get people thinking, not about something specific, not about something I endorse, not in the way that I want them to, but thinking. In the act of thinking we stumble into more thinking and thinking makes more thinking possible and in the consideration that takes place along a train of thought, new possibilities open up and boundaries fall and bonds are strengthened and action becomes an option.

Some things have to be imagined before they can become real.

I’ve never been the blond bomb shell. I’ve never been the freaky outlier who takes you on a holiday to another side of life. I don’t have long legs. Now that I am 52, a full deck, I am in the least popular age category. Not new young emerging artist nor swaggering favourite nor ageing stalwart who has always been around. Not a misfit nor a member of a reviled or contested group. No one is afraid of me. Sometimes I am invisible. But I do have a voice. I do have something to show you. I feel an irresistible urge to share. I’ve slowed down to look closely and I can do the same for you—just for a night. There’s a richness I can layer into the ordinariness. I can make it better.

It was always the case that for my success or inclusion I had to rely on the people I know or on people knowing me. People who knew me were willing to support me, to champion my work, to work alongside me. Had that not been the case I wouldn’t still be here.

I never got my best work through auditioning or interviewing. I was invited because someone already knew my work. I’m the kind of artist who has to be invited. I’m not loud in the competition. The work I do is somewhat unassuming. It doesn’t pull you off the street, it requires attention and a bit of time. It pays off. It speaks in a variety of ways. It’s not flash but it’s pearly. You don’t have to be a native speaker to follow the thread. It respects your own contribution to the moment. The unemployed bricklayer says “what’s all this then?” But after giving it some of his time he tells me his favourite part. The 20-something student of performance wonders if I know what I’m doing, if I know what I’ve done, because the thoughts he’s having seem to be all his own. He asks “did you do that on purpose?” She’s in her 80s and she tells me: “you just told the story of my life but of course you can’t have known that, thank you.” Many of the audience will say: “I could do that.” And then they do do that in their sitting rooms when they get back home for the night. There is something quite insistent in the focus on a moment, on a series of moments that seem so simple but build and build and, as with a collection of loose twigs somehow coaxed into a nest, suddenly a catastrophic shift occurs and there is a structure arising. It becomes a foundation on which audience members build their own thoughts. And this is done with others, in the company of others, and these thoughts are strengthening social cooperation as they are thoughts which hatch in collaboration with the whole room and in the presence of a community of people who come together and all look in their own ways in the same direction and ponder meanings without even trying. It is human nature kicking in, triggered by a chain reaction, triggered by the physical acts in front of them performed in their presence and taking place in real time.

So, who is my audience? my audience is the person who got lost on the way to somewhere else, the person who was dragged there by a friend and ended up feeling converted, the devoted returning follower of the development of thoughts fostered in my work and the works of others stirring the collective unconscious, the people who are out for the night and hoping that they will be pleasantly surprised, the woman who is trying to impress her date, the man who feels isolated, the casual passersby who don’t know they want anything, the unimpressed bigwig who realises much later she’s still thinking about it, the child who re-stages it the morning after. If collaboration is meant to include multi-vocality it is also engaging a multitude of reception methods and people from many walks of life. If I can appreciate the kind of work that is alien to me and find it interesting in its distance from my own experience then I can become more tolerant of and interested in the people I live in the world with. This makes life better. This makes me care more.

we went to Berlin, Berlin gave us spirals

We went to Berlin and Berlin gave us spirals. We were looking for the sound for miles & miles.

The progress was this way: 1) visit to a spring factory 2) listening to the springs with contact mics 3) jokes about inventing the wheel

The attention and different tensions, a grip and release, a kind of tuning that goes in and out, that gives way and grabs you, it winds up and down, it decays, it leads and leaps, it trembles, it lays down fine, it ambles and asks, it leans down for a closer look, it never returns. After working from the outside in we decided not to invent a new instrument but simply to misuse an existing one.

Boris got a guitar out (a baby Taylor) and began plucking strings and de-tuning them. And then Sophie and Karen began exclaiming and proclaiming it wonderful.

there is no polaroid of this in my brain

the following are not my words but I didn't wish to summarize—Karen

Antonio Damasio: I don’t have a memory. I’m not going to have a Polaroid picture of you right now talking to me complete with soundtrack. What I’m going to have is all these bits and pieces of information with which I will be allowed to reconstruct something of this moment, but of course the reconstruction is not going to be entirely accurate, and who knows? Maybe then in time I may even make a confusion and I could be asked in court to say what you were wearing and I could say that you were wearing a blue...

Siri Hustvedt: Actually and I think this is quite important, the fact that our brains and our memories are not like recording devices, not like film and that that is how we make sometimes significant errors. And those errors also can be created by an emotion attached to the experience, so that you can even entirely invert a memory, depending on the motivation in some way—and I don’t mean conscious motivation, but a deeply embodied drive or push sometimes that can have an emotional valence that will change memory.

Antonio Damasio: Right, absolutely and people you know the testimonies in court are very often affected by that and you have all sorts of misattribution errors, inversions of the time sequence and so and that is because we don’t have a filmic medium. We don’t have celluloid with an optic soundtrack attached to it. What we have is this incredibly sophisticated mechanism of transforming… It’s almost like coding. You have these little bits and pieces that are occurring in time and then you have the possibility of reconstruction or reactivation, which is they are very, very, very intriguing and by the way, it is extremely economic. You know the brain whenever it can, does things fuzzily and lazily and you know if there is no need to repeat and reinvent the wheel it won’t.

Siri Hustvedt: Well, and I think this is very important for perception because perception, the way we perceive things has to do with deep learning in the brain and one of my favorite philosophers, who you mentioned a footnote in your most recent book, Maurice Merleau-Ponty talks about perception as something he calls stereotypes and in neuroscience there is a similar idea, which is that the brain also will take in information according to its own expectations.

Antonio Damasio: Absolutely. Yeah, because we don’t… You know it’s not just that we have memory of the things that we have been living through since we were born. We have past memories that we have inherited through a whole history of evolution before us that in fact have memories of things that our forerunners have been doing and I’m not just talking about the human forerunners, but forerunners that go all the way into reptiles and single cells. You know things that have been done in a certain way in life forms and that of course been memorized by the biological systems we inherited.

You make a seal with an individual or a series of individuals and this seal creates an involuntary contract which writes itself according to the chemistry between you.

As you work together in a studio as we have, you sense and test what the rules of this contract are. you discover what is possible and the further you test, the more you learn about what is possible.

In this way the working arrangement is much like a particular view of fate or the possibilities that life at large presents. There are a constellation of prefigurations but there is also a set of variables and those rely on how you manage to use what is there practically and emotionally and magically in front of you.

On the first day in this 5-day studio residency Lucy asked me what it was like to work with the different duet partners I’ve been working with. It was hard to say without setting up a model for Lucy—people can only be the way they are—I do find I am a different creature with different people, my palate of responses is calibrated to what I perceive in the action between us.

Lucy and I misunderstood each other several times about very fundamental parts of what we were doing. But taking the long view, our focus was on making material, these moments simply continued to propel us toward what we were aiming at. Like walking robots who are designed to walk via a series of stumbles and tumbles, thus surmounting the robot’s most difficult obstacle—the pitfalls of perambulation—we agree to consider the mental stumble, the thought stutters part of how we communicate with each other rather than a sign of its impossibility.

Normally we conceived or composed a performance directive and then followed it. As a result of something I said, Lucy produced this sequence in reverse. I performed an action and then she pronounced a directive. I was surprised. Surprised is good. There is potential in surprise.

I was thinking through the parts of the event and what built it—reverse engineering a moment in which water is spilled into a river on the floor as a product of the directive: “Using gravity, stick liquid to a surface.” In this case, the directive came after the action and reversed the direction of thought from my point of view. The confusion of intention and action and the mis-chronology offer alternate spectacles and lead to re-thinking the constituent parts of a cascading chain of events, the flow of details, the unblending of a mixture, the spread then of a tumult, now visible as separate parts with separate functions yet all as one in their natural state. A post-mortem only possible post-mortem.

Everything we had mentioned or focussed on, acted upon us, even the incidental played a part in how we activated the ideas in the room. There was an abandoned water bottle in the room. I removed it only to retrieve it later when I needed a river. The students watching said: “you didn’t worry about the part that didn’t work, you just found another approach, you didn’t stop to dwell on that, you just kept going” — without stalling from the inertia of a failing plan we had changed tactics and, drawing from a chain of events set in motion by every single thing that had happened earlier that day, we carried on attempting to pull performance material into the here and now. We hadn’t noticed the switch and now the students were teaching us what we’d done.

How does one keep one’s head in the moment? Post-moment is all we seem to have. Moment is a gift to post-moment in the same way that everything I do is a gift to future-Karen and either sets future-Karen up well or not-so-well but is always a present in good faith.

But all is still not yet clear, even if I squint my eyes. From the vantage point of day’s end (of which we had five) this is now the moment when the light dies and the colours shed their names. And here now I wish to say that it became clear and then cloudy again; the material a creature which loomed and then slid back into the dark waters. I saw before its retreat, a possibility of the individual parts coming together to perform as colours do and then falling apart into something less than meaning. The creature not quite formed. Try again tomorrow. And yet contours were visible. An interdependent collection at a range of distances. A toll booth that adds up the proceeds, a voice that continues after the parade has passed. And if we continue working, the contours will stop slipping and eventually we will see through the fog to the performance taking shape in the clearing.

We read from a Bridget Riley interview: she says the colours and shapes participate in the event conceived by herself. We read from Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter the assemblage of both intentional influence and the natural properties of materials conspire to create event and the equal participation of human intention and material action and interaction make a single voice or land on a surface together to present one layer of event at one particular point in time.

And we tell ourselves this: A performance directive is a way to contribute to (or create) a future conversation. By holding up a performance which releases thought when they look at it, activate the audience to release meaning.

Make a performance which suggests a constellation the viewer wishes to name.

The room is thicker now with less of a flutter. Not as transfixed by the dead flies and the constant air travel overhead. Let’s not do something about flight safety and house flies or why haven’t we.

Calm is here and the quiet of the room is aloud. Loud enough all by itself. The listening is more and less. The space in my head is wider and more directed. We know a bit more what we don’t know about what the work might be.

Testing is the only way to know what we are as two. As two we can imagine or try to imagine what might happen or we might be hesitant to think about it because setting something down in brain matter in a linear explainable verbalised way might pave the way for entrenchment or disappointment or unnecessary disagreement—the kind that gets hung up on a technicality. So maybe we didn’t know what to expect or didn’t know what we expected and then what actually happened has cleared that up to some extent.

And the people who have stepped into the room on one or more than one occasion during the week have left a residue and we carry what they said and how they breathed in here, we carry that with us when we think about what we are doing or what we have done in this room.

So it is thicker. It is thicker with the stones and with the 20 Jesus smiles and the hands as puppets and as if something were happening and if we say it is it is and if it’s happening it is something but we do need to figure out what and we have done some of that. The failure of communication has risen as a main concern in the material. The what of the matter of the piece might be solved by the smiles and the names of them and that the smiles have names. And now we know that we must catalog the smiles and that when they are fully ordered and named then we will have finished the work.

Ten feet tall with the list of things to be punished. We need a box. How does it end up? as if we were pointing something out to you. Something about punishment and something about smiles and something about a comparison to Jesus. Je suis Jesus. And something about where to look and how these people turn their gaze and look or don’t look we look at them and see or don’t see everything that is there to see and overtime more and slower it looks like something else or more like itself but slower and more room for conjecture and puncture and rock up to the truck and “smoke’em up here boss!” and stay where you are because there are rules and everyone makes a rule to live by or looks for one and if you haven’t got one it is mayhem or if you have got one but not the right one it is mayhem or if yours is different from mine it is mayhem.

[and then I go to wikipedia and find the following]Mayhem is a criminal offence consisting of the intentional maiming of another person.

Under the common law of England and Wales and other common law jurisdictions, it originally consisted of the intentional and wanton removal of a body part that would handicap a person's ability to defend himself in combat. Under the strict common law definition, initially this required damage to an eye or a limb, while cutting off an ear or a nose was deemed not sufficiently disabling. Later the meaning of the crime expanded to encompass any mutilation, disfigurement, or crippling act done using any instrument.

This article is outdated. Please update this section to reflect recent events or newly available information. (August 2011)

The most significant change in common-law mayhem doctrine came in 1697, when the King's Bench decided Fetter v. Beale, 91 Eng. Rep. 1122. There, the plaintiff recovered in a battery action against a defendant. Shortly thereafter, "part of his skull by reason of the said battery came out of his head," and the plaintiff brought a subsequent action under mayhem. Though Fetter is also known as an early example of res judicata, it is most significant for expanding the ambit of mayhem to include "loss of the skull."

Some information has been removed by the cut-and-paster for the sake of brevity.

Etymology

Both the noun "mayhem" and the verb "maim" come from Old French via Anglo-Norman. The word is first attested in various Romance languages in the 13th century, but its ultimate origin is unclear.[4] For one theory about its origin see wiktionary:mayhem.

Other uses

Mayhem can describe a person going on a rampage. Popular misunderstanding of the common journalese expression "rioting and mayhem" caused the common usual modern use of "mayhem" to mean "havoc and disorder", often with humorous overtones.[ . . . ]

And then I think about the thin line between using the word and knowing what it means, between using it and questioning that use, between finding out that it means something different than you thought but finding out that everyone that heard you use it had the same misapprehension you did, and then what does the word mean? and then remembering how grateful you are that someone, some many ones, made this language that you use and gave it to you.

we try to set up an atmosphere

Ideally a residency takes place in a dedicated spot, a spot where those involved, in this case, the two of us, can set up an atmosphere dedicated to the work we hope to do. This work is not yet imagined. If the work can be represented by a photo perhaps there is a corner of the photo that is developed and in focus while the rest of the photo is still being developed. So we try to set up an atmosphere that is conducive to a good working climate. It is alchemical, it is a kind of magic combination of protection, collection, deliberation, and discovery. It is a container for what might come. We don’t yet know what shape it will take so it helps if it is somewhat expansive. It needs to be open and without a sense of oppression. It needs to be without distraction and yet somehow open to contamination. It needs to be stimulating without being overwhelming. It needs to be quiet enough for listening but with something to listen for.

We’d like to have a combination of cloister and gathering. We’d like to be alone and to be visited. We’d like to work hard and have it feel like play. We like to focus so that ideas will come to distract us. We’d like to stay inside and travel very far away.

It is often when we are looking intently for one thing that we find another. The one thing we are looking for cannot be merely a shill for the eventual discovery. This original focus is very influential and governs the direction of our gaze and yet it is what appears out the corners of our eyes that is often what takes over to become the ultimate focus and the centre of our attention. A kind of virtual snooker match, a set of ricochetting foci, a series of new angles and knock-on effects. We need a set of surfaces to bounce off.

The residency places us in a context offset from our usual habit. This newness is engineered to unlock routine and find possibilities in a shape becoming ours while we attempt to inhabit it. It is a place to be a tourist and see with unaccustomed eyes. It is a brand new outfit that requires us to reconsider our parameters. It is a break and a hollow place, it is a cradle and a bridge, it is a state of mind and a solid shape.

There are two residencies planned to take place at University of Roehampton, Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance. Practically this means work in the studio for 5 to 6 days followed by a public-facing presentation for the DTP community.

The two residencies in January and February at Roehampton will involve Chris Goode and Lucy Cash respectively:

solid or liquid: the shape of water

Lucy Cash and I gave a talk together at HZT in Berlin (Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz) and if you follow this link you will see it or as much of it as you'd care to see. It took place on 3 December 2014.

Loops in the brain that tangle and untangle

He asked me whether I ever looked back in my notebook. He was watching me write in it and he wanted to make the point that what I was doing was pointless and that perhaps I should not waste my time that way. He was sure that my answer to his question: do you ever go back and read what you write would be "no". I said yes and he was incredulous saying: "I never did when I wrote a notebook and so I stopped."

I thought of him just now as I was walking, because I'd mused about an idea that had come to me for something to do in a workshop. A new idea, I thought. I had been so glad about this new idea. I went through my notebook to add it to what I'd written a couple of months before for that same workshop but there it was, a note (in my own handwriting) of that same idea. I was having it again for the first time.

When I got home from the walk I cleared a block in the sink and answered some emails and sent a few tweets for the upcoming performance in Aberystwyth at which point I remembered the plan to write something down. I flexed my brain looking for it. I relaxed it. I poked a stick into the inner layers. I couldn't remember what it had been. Nothing at all came to mind. So empty.

When, as I continued to clear a few things in advance of my trip, I turned the radio on and heard a woman who takes care of elephants talking about writing a diary to keep track of developments, the memory of this internal conversation about the notebook and the memory and the workshop exercise came flowing back to me. Now I've written it down. It's all there now. Every curling loop of it.

What isn't it? she says it isn't dance, she says it is performance art

We (people) have a compulsion to categorize. We do it for the clarity. We do it for the banishment of chaos. We do it and it sometimes clouds our ability to accept something simply because it does not fit into the accepted category, or the expected category. I suppose if there were no categories it would just be soup or sewer or jumble sale. But we spend a lot of time on the categories and then we spend a lot of time straddling them or being sliced in two by them. Those categories. But we do need limiting devices. Otherwise there is too much to look at. Too much to consider. I guess defining in order to weed out what I don't want before I even see it, is somewhat suspect to me even though I am lamentably incapable of "seeing" everything.

She wrote in her review/interview: "where does movement end and dance begin?" She is using the form of the first line in our piece, Control Signal, the one she is writing about. This is our first line: "where does one beginning begin and another ending end?"

I suppose if we can't ask these questions we can't really discuss anything. I wouldn't want to put a stop to definition or to discussion or to disputation. But I wonder how useful some of these distinctions are? My question might be: What isn't dance? And that would be annoying to quite a few people I imagine. I can tell what isn't ballet. I can tell you what made me think of ballet. This did:

One of the reasons I love going to ballet and dance is that you never quite know what you’re going to experience and Control Signal certainly was nothing like I had expected, but I had expected more dance. Control Signal is more performance art and it made me question, ‘what is dance?’ and ‘where does movement end and dance begin?’

Control Signal is interesting and entertaining, and importantly made me think, and that’s always a good thing! (link to this)

if the hub and the spoke are connected, what is it, the connection?

If we are the hub, then one spoke goes out to the derelict BMW parked on the street with at least two flat tires (tyres) near the bike station where we frequently dock public bikes on our way to work, and another spoke goes out to the prank phone callers who leave voicemail messages suggesting we've won a BMW and just need to come and pick it up.

These messages became aggressive and violent after a live version of this prank call took place in which it was made clear that though they did have our home phone number, they did not know our names and therefore it was hard to believe we'd won something, in spite of her insistence.

We are the only connection between the real and the imaginary BMW or maybe there's really no connection at all. Just a thought.

Posted on Wednesday, 24 September 2014 by Karen Christopher

Was the order meticulously planned for these spillages to happen at certain times?

Tom, a 3rd year student at University of Falmouth, was writing his dissertation around the idea of the compositional ordering of a performance piece and was very interested in the way that we chose to order and compose the various "micro-elements" within Control Signal. He wrote: At the beginning of the piece the different elements seemed quite clearly defined around the edges and did not appear to relate to each other in any obvious way. However as the performance went on they slowly began to spill over into each other. I particularly remember the first moment that "Ethel Rosenberg" was mentioned and the way that that sort of seeped/trickled/conducted into the other elements of the piece, almost like electricity, making connections in my brain which began to join all of these individual elements together.Fantastic!

His question was: how much "control" did you exercise over this spilling over. Was the order meticulously planned for these spillages to happen at certain times? Or do you feel that this was this more something that was out of your "control"?

I responded that it was, as he put it, meticulously planned, but it was also intuitively felt. The style in which we worked on the performance meant that there was a lot of trial and error and finding out how to place little, time-released capsules here and there at the beginning and through the middle so that when certain big ideas are brought out it feels like there's already a history for them to rest on or little dormant ideas to activate. It causes the piece to assemble inside the heads of the audience. I think of it as little bits of dried moss that spring to life when watered.

Another student asked a related question during the post-show discussion. He asked about how the idea of translating internal thoughts into live versions of material related to the fragmentary nature of how the various bits arrived during the show. I think sequencing the material is the most important thing we do. And this has specifically to do with how to convey thoughts in the practical world, how to convey what sits inside our heads and makes sense within the tumult of information that sits in there amongst all of the things we know or think about. Translating that into material that conveys the complexity of thought as we experience it internally into something that can be shared with other people, even people we've never met, is a tricky business. It is easy if the thoughts can be generalised and concretised but if we want them to be re-assembled inside the heads of each audience member according to their own inclinations then it is a delicate balance. Maybe it's like those model ships inside bottles. It shouldn't be possible, but it is. It's a way of making the reading of the show belong to the audience and in this way it becomes their own set of ideas because they participate in the mantling (opposite of dismantling?) of it (the "set" of ideas).

Resonance, counterpoint, and confrontation, self and otherness: what does working as a duet mean? What creative methodologies, or creations does it foster across - and among - diverse fields of practice? How is the duet different from other forms of collaboration? When does this experience of alterity become an experience of duality? And what happens then?

Join us for an exploration of these questions in an afternoon of talks, dialogues and presentations focusing on the practice of duets by scholars and artists from performance, theatre, dance, music, visual arts and creative writing. As befits the subject matter, participants will take the floor in pairs in a dynamic reimagining of the traditional symposium.

Of Two Minds will be followed by an evening performance of Control Signal, a duet by Haranczak/Navarre: Karen Christopher andSophie Grodin. Christopher - formerly of the renowned American collective Goat Island - and Grodin explore invisible influences and the inexplicable connections we feel but fail to acknowledge.

'red spot on tulip' returns results and then thoughts of irritation

I looked up "red spot on tulip" because I had a bunch of white tulips and one of them had a thin strip of red that was only about a centimeter long and the width of an eyelash. I'd another bunch of tulips that were pink and green and one of them had a small red splotch which caught my eye. When you google "red spot on tulip" this is what happens:

The first thing I saw was a photo of a field of white tulips including one with a striking red spot. Another link mentioned something about a virus which gave tulips red streaks of extravagant design and I thought, oh, perhaps these tiny red spots are just a bit of a cold, a tulip virus, a flu, but just a touch, not the kind that completely takes over.

This made me think of pearls and irritation and of pressure and diamonds and how if you send a couple of elements that repel each other through a supercolider together their bond might produce a bright orange colour because they are are not compatible but they have been forced to join up and this has, so to speak, irritated them. I've seen it. It is beautiful.

What never stops?

We've just posted Joe Kelleher's edited transcript of our post show discussion following our premiere of Control Signal 10 October 2013 at Chelsea Theatre. *Spoiler alert* There's some content information that might taint your mind. If you've never seen the show and want to go in cold some time in the future don't read it. On the other hand, it might give you the nudge you've been waiting for. We'll have some more performance dates coming up in the Autumn. It's not too soon to start dreaming.

not just what was said, but also everything it sounded like

As far as I know he was a large parrot named Cesar. A big favorite. A beloved pet. He was inherited by my friend when her husband’s grandmother died. There may have been some sibling rivalry over the bird. It was considered a prize. And this bird spoke and talking birds hold secrets and release revelations in the declaration of what they have learned to say through the hearing of oft repeated sounds.

A bird who imitates what it hears learns the regular, the repeated, it learns to imitate without prejudice. It learns by rote. And it learns without embellishment. So the family learned a bit about grandma’s habits. In addition to usual lines the parrot was taught intentionally, words specifically considered charming for parrots to say, he also said [with conspiratorial fervor]: “I’m going to talk to Kenny!” Kenny was the next door neighbor.

My friends with the parrot had to relax their minds as they listened to the inexplicable sound he made in order to sense the totality of it. It had a rhythm and a tone distinctly human without using a single human word. With an aural version of a squint or the kind of cognitive unclenching that releases a fugitive memory, my friend finally realized that Cesar, the parrot, was imitating the sound of a phone conversation as heard from the other side of a closed door. The cadence of speech was distinctly grandmother’s phone voice, the pauses indicated the unheard part of the conversation, and the muddled non-verbal quality was due to the transmission of her words through the closed door between his cage and the kitchen phone.

Continuous present, beginning again and again

The company's work is committed to discovery--rather than starting with a theme or focus on a particular area of concern or in a presumed format--each project begins with a search for how and where to begin. By determining the context of the material through a process of discovery we allow prevailing concerns and interest of the artists involved to be affected by prevailing concerns and interests of the community around them. Attempting to acknowledge the continuous present, and beginning again and again, and using everything.

AND--this just in from Gertrude Stein's Composition as Explanation:

"And now to begin as if to begin. Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here. This is some time ago for us naturally. There is something to be added afterwards. [ . . . ] the composition forming around me was a prolonged present. [ . . . ] and nobody knew why it was done like that, I did not myself although naturally to me it was natural."

five bees, one blossom

In southern California, where I was living and working for 6 weeks last Autumn there were quite a few humming birds positioning themselves in front of flowers in front of me. I was looking at everything as if I'd never seen that kind of thing before. But also as though everything there was part of my history and as such offered a tonic. When I saw this flower, one of many on a sprawling bush, I was alarmed to see how many bees were cuddled against the center of each blossom.

Posted on Monday, 10 February 2014 by Karen Christopher

Mary wrote something that made me cry 3 weeks later

The thing is, when it came in, her piece of writing, I was far away in California (looking at the sky) and the October performances at Chelsea Theatre were a distant glowing memory but the problems that were right in front of me were the ones I was focussed on and the life just before was pale or hazy and her writing brought it all clearly back into focus.

This piece by Mary Paterson about Control Signal (duet by Karen Christopher and Sophie Grodin) is revealing the heart of what we were working on and the way Mary has been able to articulate her experience of it hit me like cupid's arrow, a kind of beautiful pain.

the long arms of the Montana seed harpoons waving

These seed harpoons embedded their hooks into my shoes and walked through the field in Montana and the airport and the airplane and the duty free shops and immigration and customs and the tube and they have long curly tails or flags or arms. They're not shy. They just reach out, grab on, and start waving.

Posted on Thursday, 28 November 2013 by Karen Christopher

we asked for a 55-foot note and he complied

We said, answer the question: "what never stops?" We said, angular rhythm, something with a 55-foot note. We said, your idea. We said, a dialogue with contamination, with influence, with subsonic itch. We said, make it vibrate. Boris Hauf made some music for us and it is good.

Boris Hauf designed music for Control Signal listen here: TOPSY hear him live at the performances in Bristol or London.

the ebb and the flow of the way it goes in these final days

Leading up to our premiere (Control Signal, preview 3rd October in Bristol at Wickham Theatre, University of Bristol and then premiere 10th & 11th October at Chelsea Theatre in London) we are taking it fine, smooth, and with raggedy edges that scratch what itches and itch what doesn’t. It is easy and isn’t easy. It is fast and slow at the same time it is trying to hold a polyrhythm in your head. I hear that we are finishing. I hear it every morning. I hear it before I go to sleep at night. We are fact finishing but we are not screaming into the finish line, we are stepping. The steps high and irregular early in the past week. We stumbled at a few steps which were just ever so slightly misjudged. Forgot this, didn’t enjoy that. It was better the second day. And we tap-danced into the third day which felt like a dream dotted with laugh. So it goes in fits and starts. Adjustments to new versions. Long discussions about the pause or not the pause and this table is not going to work no it won’t well if it has to no, actually, not even then.

I’m certain it will feel like a free-fall when we finally crack the ice on this one but we will be ready and not forget to pull our rip cords and remember to look around us on the way to the ground. I think we are lined up to enjoy it.

Chisenhale week in which we remember that real life continues even now

The crime that we didn’t commit, that we committed not to commit, is to stop living while we make this piece, even in the final phase in which push is coming to shove. If we are squeezed between a rock and a hard deadline it think we’d just as well get comfortable. If it is close, we’ll just cuddle that cut-off.

Working at Chisenhale was great. We were in the main space so we had depth of space and beautiful sunlight coming in through the windows. We also had jackhammers. It was time to replace that old cement with bricks outside in front of the building across the street. This was our sound track while we worked with Boris Hauf who created some excellent sound for the piece. Litó Walkey worked with us as an outside eye and helped corral our thoughts and aspirations into a more minimal package. She helped clarify the images we were working toward.

It all happened as we hoped: some time for showing the guests artists what we were doing (had been doing or thought we were doing or hoped to be doing), some time for them to explore the city and think about us working without them in the studio, some time for us to work without them, some time for them to come back and say we missed you yesterday and thought about you as we wandered the city, more time to work, some time to have a meal together. I didn’t sleep enough but otherwise, it was great. The piece has been combed and parted, we got the extra bits out. Now we just have to do better what we’ve got left. We’ll work it and run it 6 times before we go to Bristol and then it will be complete.

and we worked a long time on something we had to throw away

Two of us alone in a room and we worked on it and we played with it and people came in and said things about it. And then the next week we knew it all had to change. So easy now to let it go. Last week it would have broken our hearts.

There's a chair suspended between us tipping and eyes in the window of the door

Report #1 from FLINTwalls residency where we (Karen & Sophie) are working in the Performing Art Studios at The University of Winchester (31st August through 6th September):

- two people trying to help each other; two people working against the point; a chair slowly turning upside down; a frozen image of the present; a competition between body and object; a hierarchical dance; a constructed image; an image of collaboration; a slow movement towards the world; a position to wait in until the strings snap; desperation; tension; something not going anywhere; a realisation.What I am seeing is something created between us.What I am seeing is empty space opening.What I am seeing is an empty chair: provision for a future.What I am seeing is useless.What I am seeing is force exerted to the right and left causes an upward motion.What I am seeing is a skeleton of a chair.What I am seeing is the trace of a craftsman.What I am seeing is a hollow place.What I am seeing is space carved.What I am seeing is floating.What I am seeing is light.What I am seeing is caught in a web.What I am seeing is a chair caught in a web.What I am seeing is double spiders large enough to eat a chair.What I am seeing is the empty space around the chair.What I am seeing is the space around the chair is shifting.What I am seeing is the space between us is shifting.work continues.

failure institute, a week in Luxembourg

I gave a performative talk in Luxembourg as part of Independent Little Lies' residency, Krisounours. A month of intensive failure studies at KulturFabrik. This was the very end:

Eduardo Galleano writes of Utopia: "Utopia is on the horizon. When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is Utopia for? It is for this, for walking."

We donʼt keep our failures handy. I havenʼt made a collection of my own failures, not really, itʼs hard to remember them. We donʼt remember to keep our failure ready--itʼs best they are left behind as as not to make us fearful of progress or unsteady on our feet--we remember only the largest, the ones that urge us to better days and loftier ideals and press us to improve.

Because you asked me, I had to explain, because I had to explain I thought about it carefully, because I thought about it carefully I understand it better now and in new ways. Failure does the same thing. This talk canʼt do everything, itʼs just a couple of pixels that make up the full array available in failure. I havenʼt done justice to disgrace or transgression.

Mine was the only heart not beating in unison.

I can think of a lot of failure thatʼs absolutely necessary including failure to just stand by and watch injustice taking place. Failure to keep quiet. Failure is connected with the future and with prediction--there is no failure without expectation. Ellude expectation, is it possible?

What is failure to me? Iʼm not an engineer, I donʼt build bridges. I am a bridge.

Seven Falls can't fail

As part of my current performance work I am engaged with making a series of duets. Each duet is designed collaboratively between the two duet partners, me and one other person. The duet partners determine the length of work time, the style of the work, the starting place, and the specific making process undertaken.

One of the duets, Seven Falls, has a method that canʼt fail. It is site-specific and must be performed next to a large body of water, a major river, lake or sea. In each location it is performed it is re-made with a few foundation elements common to each version. The method is swift and immersive.

My partner for this duet, Teresa Brayshaw, has a full-time job and a 11-year-old son. If she is to be able to make this work we have to do it fast--she doesnʼt have much time. Our working methods have been designed to allow for her tight schedule. She and I arrive at a site having met a few times for meetings in the month or so leading up to the performance date. Then once on site we usually have 3 to 4 days to re-make the work in response to the site and take care of logistics. The swift turn around time means thereʼs no time for arguing, it means that everything we do during those 3 or 4 days is about getting ready for the piece. Not failing means being flexible, open to change, to uncertainty and being fearless about the possibility of getting it wrong. And if we want the process to be enjoyable it means we have to allow leisure activities to invade these work-heavy days and food and sleep. We stay together, eat together, walk around the environs together, and treat everything as possible material for the work. When our plans are scuttled for logistical reasons we change our plans, treating it as an opportunity to improve the piece. We agree to less than readiness--we are always ready.

ls that young would be able to deliver the translations, reading off the handwritten cards prepared for them. At our last performance, in Bilbao, we thought we would have 20 young girls from the theatre school making a cameo appearance in red cardigans, we imagined them flying small hand-made red paper kites. Then we were told the school would be finished the week before our show and it would be impossible to get them back to be involved in our show. But, we were told, it was possible that two 12-year-old girls could join us on the day of the performance. The old idea wouldnʼt work with this new configuration. But we had a new one--the girls could deliver the translations into Spanish and Basque of our minimal spoken text. This seemed like a great idea. When photos came the week before our arrival the girls looked more like 16 years old and we asked via email how old they were. There was no answer and unbeknownst to us they changed the girls, assuming, because of our question, that they were the “wrong age”. When we asked about the girls the day before the show we were told that there were new girls now and that they were 8 years old. Now we wondered whether girls that young would be able to deliver the translations, reading off the handwritten cards prepared for them.

When it was all done, looking back, it was genius to have such young girls reading the translations. They wore red dresses and we wore red dresses and we were amazed how beautiful it was to have them read the translations and then take our bows after weʼd walked into the distance at the end of the piece. In this way, we let the circumstances compose the piece with us and because we had not overdetermined the outcome or solidified our expectations, there was no chance of disappointment and thus no failure.

the difference between thinking and making

I wanted to build a crying machineI wanted to build a time machine I wanted to build a machine BUTI am a performance maker.

I asked a question: what never stops?

This talk is a time machine, it will take us into the future.

The difference between thinking and making is like the difference between the idea of a knife and the presence of the knife right here in my hand.

* * *

At Kate McIntosh's Worktable @ IBT in Bristol the audience, one by one, were to dissasemble an object and put one back together. I chose a huge sea shell. I didn't think I could do it. Alone in a room at my "worktable" I was faced with a table top of tools: hammers, chisels, a saw, vice grips, scissors. At first I didn't want to break apart the shell and then I really couldn't. It received quite a few bashes with the hammer without damage. I had to put it between a rock and a hard place and even then it was just thin splinters that flew up from the point of impact. Good thing I'd been issued goggles.

I would have said to you, you can't bring me the smell of the ocean. I would have said to you: how could a dry thing bear such a smell and as I hit this sea shell I stopped thinking about where it came from and I just focussed on trying to put a hole in it. I despaired of making the slightest crack when I stopped and took up a hack saw. Slowly, but with purpose, I drew back and forth across the top of the sea shell and I steadied everything and put my back into it. Some time may have passed.

All of a sudden the scent of the sea rose straight into my senses: it reached my nose but even more rapidly my heart. For a moment I was all the way there. Suddenly it was my childhood and dried salt on my skin--no sound but the waves that never stop: each wave momentary; the waves, continuous; and those days when we never left the water or peered for hours into the tide pools losing our time sense and any idea of future.

What never stops? This is a question that has stimulated inspiration during the creation of a new duet that Sophie Grodin and I are working on (almost finished . . . ). Of the many answers to this question, some have turned into material for the performance. When you see the show you will not know that we asked ourselves this question but you will see the answer to it.

Seven Falls in Bilbao

once more into the canoe . . .

A state of presence with each other in our case was fostered by a relaxed way of being together and holding open for possibilities and not straining to achieve but rather finding an active search, finding a way to put our bodies into it. Not following instructions but following instinct or train of thought. Submitting to trickster. We two found an even ground between us where physical work, throwing the body into action, provides results and further direction. This time the piece will incorporate giant paper boats and miniature kites along with the usual canoes filled with water and procedures for keeping safe. Teresa Brayshaw and I will be getting into the canoes in Bilbao, Spain. We are recreating our performance duet, Seven Falls, on the last day of the ACT Festival. The programme can be seen here if you zoom in you can see us in the strip at the bottom (closing night).

Look Both Ways

Utopia is on the horizon. When I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking.--Eduardo Galleano

It's a workshop to compose a question. The question will start a process of discovery. The question will be inspiring or lead into a brick wall, a question will launch a ship or take you down a dark alley. These questions are to provoke a response, these will not be neutral questions, these are questions that influence an answer. They are leading questions. We are looking for leading questions. They function as agents that stimulate a reaction, development, or change, something that causes fermentation. It is a workshop to find a question that takes the form of a walk during which we hope to compose this question or to find it. Among other things we weave a weft through the warp of attention drawn by future train passengers silently standing all facing departure boards at Euston station. Or are we the warp. Just because we continue passing doesn't mean we aren't for those moments the stability around which the weave is made visible.

We listen, we watch, we dissassemble and assemble. We hover a bit here or there to write. We radiate: this is the moment that we have.

I am standing in the middle of a dance performed by travelers, by pigeons, by plastic shopping bags, the sirens from ambulances, the beep beep of taxis, an indeciferable roar, the confessions of trees, the conversations of men--into phones, a blizzard of seeds, a pram with a balloon attached, a bank slip, a long beard, a caravan of wheeled suitcases. So many hands pressing plastic close to the faces. Calling, calling, calling.

Introduce the stars to an ant: a Wednesday talk for Chelsea

I'll be appearing at Chelsea Theatre's Wishful Wednesdays talk on 22 May at 7:30pm. I'll be talking. And more. They serve a bit of wine and cheese and it's an informal occasion to hear and talk about something the invited artist has chosen to focus on. Please come and hear and talk and fly a kite and chase a bit of sugar through my blood stream and grow a tree on your head and introduce the stars to an ant and draw with a cloud and push milk uphill with a sharp stick and add it to the coffee at the top. It's at the World's End (it's not as far away as you think).

Performance of So Below as part of symposium: On Collaboration II

So Below, a duet performance by Gerard Bell & Karen Christophera Haranczak/Navarre Performance Project is being presented as part of On Collaboration II, a symposium presented at Middlesex University, Hendon Campus at 6pm Saturday 18 May 2013.

So Below will be presented at the end of the symposium day. We are inviting a limited number of people to attend the performance even if they are not attending the symposium itself. As part of this invitation there is no charge to attend the performance of So Below.

RSVP for the performance only here and instructions will be sent for where to show up on the day. There are a limited number of places which will be filled in order of responses received.

Long waves begin to form

Long waves begin to formStories of the wind in 5 parts–fragments for a future performanceAs part of an ongoing investigation into invisible forces, this is an early study, a small sketch for something really big about the wind.

Long waves begin to form [for Forest Fringe at the Gate April 22nd 2013]

Wind is an accumulation of small bits that gang up and together create a force that individually they would never accomplish---it’s a gathering, it is small bits pitching in together, it is the tiniest little elements adding up to something once they’ve joined together in motion David AND Goliath in one. An innumerable sum of Davids together making one massive Goliath. Every yes, every no of every little particle, Volcanic dust, radioactive particles, and the dust of 1000’s of people atomised in the collapse of very tall buildings travel toward or away-- curse the wind, thank the wind, there’s not much that can change it.

This just in from CJ Mitchell:

Here, Gone & the promise of more to come

We've now received and posted written responses to So Below from two invited responders: Joe Kelleher and Mary Paterson. There are excerpts here and links to the full texts (below).

From Joe Kelleher'is piece:

‘As above, so below’ is a peculiar, two-ways-facing formula that implies at the same time a turning in to secrets and mysteries – a hermeticism in that sense – but also an involvement and opening out: from world to world, from one individual to another, from the individual to the universe, or from the place and time in which we find ourselves into spaces we have to access through memory, or sympathetic imagination, through what we are able to conjure poetically through gesture and speech, or faith. In Karen Christopher and Gerard Bell’s theatrical duet So Below other places seem to be constantly intruding into what is going on here; or at least the signs of such intrusion are there to be gathered up, tuned into, sniffed out.

So Below is a duet that unfolds as if Karen Christopher and Gerard Bell know what’s going to happen, but they haven’t discovered it yet. It appears like a story glimpsed in a stream of words that have tumbled out of a book in the wrong order. To watch, it is surprising. To remember, it is full of sensory pleasure, like a mist of steam rising from a silver spout. Sometimes you can hear Karen’s footsteps before you see her: the sound is a crunch of boots on something hard, and it sounds of longing. You think: if only I could dance a ritual like Karen and Gerard and make absent bodies reappear. If only I could make the sound of Karen into something corporeal. They dance like they’re praying – swinging back and forth with the words of gravestone inscriptions falling from their lips, their tidy bodies folding and unfolding like envelopes of magic.

the new studio looks like this, and this, and this

something about working with people

We create a climate together.We create a system of balances with weights that we have tested ourselves. We’ve adjusted the clocks. We designed new dishes with food from different shelves. Practically speaking, it’s like moving in with a new roommate and everything must be tested and preferences declared. Positions are taken and each of us must decide what we are willing to sacrifice.

Habits are easy to form and we form them quickly. We find what works with a particular set of people and conditions and we repeat successful combinations. When studio time is over at the end of a process it is like breaking up a way of life. Void is felt and I spend a few days lost and bereft.

the one about the parrot feather has three parts separated by years

Part one: flocks of parrots in the tall treesIn 2006 Goat Island performed at Forum Freies Theatre in Düsseldorf (Germany). We stayed for week and ran a workshop as well as performing “When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy.” I bought a hat in Düsseldorf, so did Bryan. The walk from our accommodation to the theatre took us through a fantastic old park with tall trees populated by flocks of bright green parrots. Each day I heard the parrots screeching around in the tree tops as I passed through the park. Sometimes I saw them flying in groups. CJ Mitchell was not with us on that tour and I missed him and I wanted to bring him a gift but didn’t want to buy something useless to bring back to Chicago. I had one afternoon off during which I’d have some time to find something for him. I decided to use it to find a parrot feather in the park. With so many parrots flying around all the time, I thought, they must be dropping their green feathers down onto the ground beneath. There should be a number of lovely green feathers, I thought, nestled into the layers of autumn leaves resting in the woodiest areas. So I spent two hours carefully scouring the ground for green feathers. I saw plenty of feathers but none of them green.

Part two: the green featherIn 2009 I moved to London and I joined the group of people participating in Rajni Shah’s DIY workshop, Not Knowing. That was the name of it: Not Knowing. It seemed a fitting start to my time in London. We met over three days and participated in various activities all of which threw us into some kind of state of unknowing, uncertainty, doubt. The final day we went separately to far flung parts of the city to participate in different sorts of activities. These locations were drawn at random from a collection of options prepared in advance by Rajni. Mine was Isabella Plantation which is an enclosure within Richmond Park. It was about as far as I could go on the District line from the east end where I live. When I got to Richmond Park I still had to find “Isabella Plantation” and I was despairing of finding it in time for the guided walk that I was meant to join. My head was swirling and I was about to lose the plot and cease caring when I looked at the ground and saw a green bird feather. A parrot feather perhaps. Yes. I decided it was indeed. This telescoped me back to the park in Düsseldorf and my two-hour search.Part three: in which CJ is finally includedWalking back home from the Victoria Park pavilion where we’d gotten a coffee at the tail end of 2012, CJ and I went along Sugar Loaf Walk past The Camel heading towards the back of the Museum of Childhood when I heard quite a screech and it took me by surprise. I stopped to see what manner of bird made this noise as it was familiar but wrong. I was stopped short by the sound of it. I looked up and high up in a nearby tree there was a green bird. Ah! CJ! It’s a parrot! I said. And just then, before CJ could see it, it flew down into a nearby yard on the other side of a fence, a communal garden attached to a block of flats. As we looked for it we began to realise there were quite a few of them. Six at least. Six parrots around a couple of bird feeders. It was hard to take a phone camera photo of them from where I was standing and yet I felt it somehow necessary to try. In one of them you can just about tell that there are parrots there. A flock of parrots and CJ Mitchell and me all in the same place. It doesn’t make sense. But it really happened.

Taking our pots to Falmouth 2nd November at Performance Centre

So Below has been dismantled and folded into two trucks and taken by courier to Falmouth. The objects sit there waiting for ourselves to arrive and get them back out of the big blue cases. This after waiting in the dressing room at Chelsea for more than a year.

The show will take place on 2nd November at Performance Centre Join us if you are near enough and please say hello afterwards.

So Below premiere at Chelsea Theatre

It's finally completed and completed once again each time and it's never quite the same and you can't put it in a camera or even a hard drive (though Adam Levy's done a great job with the photos taken earlier in the week at a rehearsal)--it's all tangled up with being there. The performance is not just a series of ideas, it is also being there.

At a certain point there is an accummulation and this lands on the audience in a delicate way--it wells up or it curls in like smoke. And afterwards they say all of a sudden it occurred to me.

Ten Impossibilities

Separate the airDefine waterDraw with a cloudChase a bit of sugar through your blood streamIntroduce the stars to an antFollow one ant all dayCopy everything the honey bee doesInterview your dead sisterPush milk uphill with a sharp stick, add it to the coffee at the topUse a spoon to wash your hairBreath for another person

the muscle of the eye gets stuck

My nearsightedness has a number and among its other complications it has a depth of range--that is the depth of the area that is affected by this fault in the musculature of my eye and the depth of the area that the corrective lenses--these new glasses for reading and other close viewing--corrects, but those outside the rage will become fuzzier. As I get older this aspect of my vision gets worse and I’m told that it is not that the muscle of the eye gets stuck on the relaxed position but actually that it begins to hold tighter and to fail to relax. I’m wondering if a similar phenomenon might happen to my tolerance level and to my understanding. And I’m wondering if there is a lens for that.

This was written in response to a invitation from Open Dialogues to send a note for their NOTA presentation as part of Oh Seminar at Villa Romana, Florence in September 2012.

twin mixer tap

Sometimes work is a conversation, sometimes it is looking for (and finding!) a note in a notebook from June 1993 in preparation for that conversation. If it hadn't gone well, the feeling of inadequacy might have been overwhelming. But with a little preparation (no matter how lame it might seem) a conversation which might go nowhere can instead feel like a big success. I was lucky to have a particularly generous and thoughtful interlocutor. In answer to his questions I managed to draw a line between two different memories and see what they had in common. One was a note I'd copied out in my notebook during an early tour to the UK. The note was in the shower for the dressingrooms of the Arnolfini in Bristol, the other was a label with instructions on the underside of an ironing board in those same dressingrooms. Who knows why specific details stick in the mind or provoke one to take out a notebook and make a note. These two notes were some of my first exposure to the care and concern around procedure and matters of instruction (and, by implication, safety) that is encountered in public places here in Britain. The shower note comprised instructions for obtaining water from the shower of the desired temperature. I'd never been in a shower where this had been deemed necessary. Most showers I'd know had been fairly self explanatory. The label on the underside of the ironing board, in its folded and upright position leaning against the wall, was visible from a seat at the dressinginroom mirror and it was headed "Methods of Opening and Closing". What followed this auspicious heading were instructions for the erection and re-folding of the ironing board. It may be that from my position in a perpetually illegitimate field (the position of alternative performance in the USA) I was never subjected to standards and procedures. It may be that my personal world never relied on anything that was codified and made safe. But these careful instructions (pendantic as they were) ushered in another way of looking at moving through the world. Lito Walkey and I later used the name Methods of Opening and Closing for a workshop we designed. I think the technician who wrote the shower instructions may have been taking the mickey, but it was carefully done and probably in the wake of numerous complaints from visiting performers having trouble obtaining their ideal shower conditions. All of it still makes sense and still makes me laugh.

Posted on Wednesday, 15 August 2012 by Karen Christopher

Everyday magic: this is no dream, this is really happening

I walk with CJ to work some mornings. At the moment he’s still lucky enough to be able to walk to work. There’s an older guy who lives down the way and who often likes to say hello and to speak to CJ about me (about CJ’s relationship to me) as we pass. It’s kind of an old school, guy thing. A couple of weeks ago he told us a joke that involved our participation. Something about a duck going into a pub. Often we see each other from a bit of a distance--this means he has time to prepare himself.

This morning he told CJ off for walking on the inside and not protecting me from the street by taking the street side of the sidewalk. He asked CJ if he knew about that rule and before CJ could answer the man turned to me and said do you know about that? CJ said: yes, she does, we’ve discussed it. The man thought this was funny. He went on to explain that it was to spare the woman (“her”) from the side with the mud and the horses, you know, he says, when the street had horse-drawn carriages. Yes, and all of this while we never stop walking and he’s going in the opposite direction to us.

After this interlude was concluded and still simmering in the giggle he’d left us with, I thought I heard horses’ hooves clomping on asphalt. Two sets of four I thought. I turned around and then so did CJ. Our neighbor was gone but here on the cross street behind us (Valance Street) was a coach pulled by 2 horses driven by a man in a tall hat and long coat. It was a glass-sided carriage, long, for a horse drawn funeral, on its way to picking up a coffin I’ll guess, maybe at English & Sons down the way on Bethnal Green Road.

I began to swoon as the magnitude of it and my brain was increasing this moment in size and weight---I might have chosen not to but I was latching on hard and fast.CJ: It’s a coincidence.Me: It’s the only kind of magic we have.(don’t argue with me, I did say it but I don’t stand by that assertion)CJ: It’s nicely layered.

Posted on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 by Karen Christopher

today only: the first time we sit down to write at the same time

We’ll sit and write for one hour and because we will be together in a quiet place of reading and the smell of books we are expecting to have a different pressure on ourselves to spend time thinking about what we want to work on paper and what we want to shape into language to put our multi-streamed inner thoughts into a single straight grammatical line. We are attempting to reflect on our process and part of doing that will be reconstructing in words what we think happened and what we can remember and how we thought about it. What were the dreams we didn’t uncover and what dreams are still clear to us that we haven’t yet reached and what do we know about anything and what did we not find out but we still see a flag waving for if only in the far distance. I suppose there weren’t any question marks there because they weren’t really questions or they were questions but the sound of them didn’t go up at the end of the sentence. If you want to you can make sense of it even when the punctuation is very very very loose or not there at all. Loosen one part and the whole geometry shifts. We’ll be checking for structural defects at the same time.

We = Sophie and KarenOur process = composing Control Signal, a performance work, a duet between us

thought process stimulated by footnote number 13 and NOTA c. Open Dialogues 2012

I was reading a book along side an infuson of caffeine. I read the technical description (a footnote in the book I was reading) of binaural sound and how different directionalities and qualities of sound production stimulate the ear in different ways and how the brain contributes in the way compensation occurs in order to make sense of the sensation and I spontaneously organized in my head a section of performance in which a layering of these kinds of detailed and laboured descriptions and instructions occurs including one I encountered long ago in the old shower backstage at the Arnolfini (early 90s) whch involved an in-depth explanation of what the twin-mixer valve did--and these explanations which we obsessively collect around us as a buffer against the idea that NOTHING is within our control. This performance material played in my head and I saw that it creates an overflow which catalyses a shift in perception and I flashed on the reading of NOTA's inscriptions (one of which is excerpted in the image above) created during the work-in-progress at SHOWTiME (16 JUNE) [NOTA c. Open Dialogues 2012]. It was the memory of reading "she transforms herself, as if the light(ning) behind her eyes has changed" that caused a chemical reaction in my sequence of thought.

And what just happened as a result of the pile up in that chain link sequence of thoughts is that I had a micro-revelation: this kind of transformation is what I'm always intuitively shooting for. When people experience a shift in the reading of the performance or in a particular performer and realise that their own initial assumptions or reading of the performance or person in front of them was incomplete or is shifting, they might become aware shift is possible, change is possible, or that their initial assumptions are unreliable or mutable or based on unstable criteria as a matter of course in daily life. I guess I already knew that, but I was madly reacquainted with it this morning. An important realisation and catalyst for change is possible when people experience that kind of shift before them. Transformation is possible--a mountain can shift, a nest can be built.

A suspension followed by a flurry

He arrived across the island from me, the big table by the door with the high stools around it. And instead of spacing himself to balance the table he heavily weighted the side I was on and I resented him for it. Then I softened, thought better of it. I mean, if I knew this man I wouldn’t begrudge him a spot at the table wherever he wanted it, so why should I restrict him to a place far from me just because he was a stranger--if even just in my mind. I wouldn’t have looked up at him to bark “step-off!” the way a New Yorker I once knew shouted at a man who stood too close to her “on line” at the post office. Once I’d softened I became interested in him and decided to look up. He was over 60, maybe way over sixty (how does one tell?), a bit of a pulpy nose, worried, in a motionless way, looking left out the glass doors, waiting. Then I noticed his right hand, poised, holding two long slim packets of sugar the ends already neatly torn off. They were waiting, in hand. I considered the possibility that I should take a photo of this hand. I wondered how he would feel about that. I wondered too long. Just as I got the camera out his espresso arrived, the sugars were dumped in, stirred quickly, and the shot was downed before I could lift it. And then he left. It was all over in an instant or two. A suspension followed by a flurry.

the effect of focusing on something for more than a short time

As I walked past the park I was drawn to the bouncing of the white bread, the way the pigeons made it look like a party. I decided to cross the street, enter the park, and take a little video. I don't like pigeons. I want to make that clear. I don't think people should dump huge loads of white bread on the pavement for the birds to eat. (I saw a massive soggy mess in the water at Victoria Park the other day . . . ). So I took this video and I went home. When I got in, I concieved an irresistable urge to make popcorn. I have a little jar from when my mother was here. I might make popcorn once in a blue moon, it's very uncharacteristic of me. But I made a bit of popcorn I took the appropriate dose of insulin, and I ate it. Only later when I saw this video on my phone did I make the connection.

two women lying in water-filled canoes / a constant quivering / two figures surrounded by buckets of water

For me the work is about a central image I care about. The rest of the piece is a way to earn that image. There are layers of foundation and sediment around, above, and below that but somehow that is a central core that gives me something to go on . . . especially when everything is in flux (most of the time).

father! open the door!

I just found these on my phone. They are from the day during the occupation at St. Paul’s that the church locked the doors. This man, wrapped in his blanket was banging on the door and shouting: Father! Open the door. I was there with a group of students. One of them said: oh please get a picture for me, I don’t have my camera.

what never stops, or what feels that way

I asked myself what never stops? And then I tried to start something that I could continue long enough that it might feel that it could never stop or at the very least that it might continue for some considerable time. Standing still might never stop but it doesn’t carry that question of stopping it is more oriented toward the question “what never starts?” I felt it might be a kind of small perpetual motion that would make the viewer wonder about stopping or continuing or never stopping and so I tried this a few times. It became a small jiggle in the hips from side to side which emanated in a whole body quiver with its origin in the middle.

When it was finally put in front of an audience I was so excited I performed it at what might be described as level 5 (on a size/speed/decibel scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the loudest and fastest and biggest) when it should have been at level 1.5 or 2. I must confess to a small disappointment in relation to this. With any luck I will have other chances to keep it small.

Comments I received after the show seemed to prove this action was causing stress around the question of duration. Some offered (unsolicited) that this action was too short, some offered (unsolicited) that it was too long and one genius talked about how it sent him back into a reverse inventory of the material of the piece which now reconfigured its meaning in light of this ongoing vibration. There's definitely something in that.

Play us all the way home

While working on Control Signal in a rehearsal room at the People Show we realised we needed a cart with wheels. Something to contain us. Something that stood in for a background, a setting, a look. We knew that it looked like either hospital, a laboraory, or restaurant. We went to the restaurant supply and found it out there in the yard covered in rain, already one life behind it. We wheeled it home. Sophie accompanying the journey on harmonica.

principles of attraction & repulsion

For 1Move objects in the room with your voiceMove objects in Denmark with your eyes

For 2Make a dance for 4 arms and hands that contains seaweed and lightning strikes in perpetual motion lock-grooves.

and

positively charged glass tube held close to boy's feet negatively charged his feet which caused other extremities to be positively charged and then brass leaf partiicles were attracted to his exposed face and hands

We are here: Millennium Bridge, Gateshead

The day before our show we are checking the location and making some plans and feeling a bit cold and wondering how cold it will be the next day when we will for sure be getting into canoes filled with water. This we know. And we are trying to feel certain about everything but the only thing that is certain is that we will have canoes and they will be filled with water. Everyone at the GIFT festival in Gateshead is very cooperative. We asked for Canadian canoes. We got Canadian canoes. We asked for water. We got water. We also got mega phones. Very exciting.

Now the day of the show is here, the wind is whipping through on its way from the North Sea, the air is as grey as the Tyne, we are visible only because of our red jackets.

Tea Flower

This tea was so beautiful I took its picture.

Sophie Grodin and I just finished taking photos with Paul Williams at Abney Park so that we could document the public micro performances we were making as part of of our practice research. How do the park and the people walking by pollute our plans and temper our activations? The mind unfolds in a different way when met with the intersection of those out with the world of our investigation. Paul with a camera changes everything. Points of significance shift.

The tea was just as good.

The only failure was in not getting it from the very beginning (a tight ball of dusky green).

Lighting design for So Below

So slow this So Below. We are postponed again for performing but have decided to have the lights designed now so that we are ready for when we finally put this show in front of people. Chelsea Theatre provided space and equipment. The marvelous Marty Langthorne designed for us.

14 days of evidence: research for Control Signal: SLOW

For some reason this word SLOW written on the road has always caught my eye and in this instance provoked me to stand here for 5minutes as part of our 14 days of collecting micro performances in public places for research on Control Signal. I stood using the road writing as a caption for my action as people rushed by. Not entirely sure anyone saw this piece though many people passed on their way toward and away from Central Station, Glasgow.

get in the canoe

Second conversation of our first conversation week. I (Karen) and Teresa attempt a dialogue about a piece that doesn’t exist yet. The plan is that I’ve organized a structure for this conversation. I was ready with it. This is on skype as T is in Manchester and I am in London. We started with Teresa showing me an iron mouse which I initially thought was a chocolate rabbit. I had made a plan (organized) to introduce a new conversational direction every 7 min. First section was free form and then it was to be each section introduced by a word or a question--however--once the mouse appeared I remembered an earlier organizational idea which was to start by saying “show me something” then this was to be continued with each of us taking turns showing something to the other. Interruptions continued and none of my plans was ever followed but we were not at a loss. We were moving, moving fast.

looking close

looking close to home staying in finding what’s fine looking no further than just outside the windowa feather escaped, a tiny fold, a blue wallbare branches leave shadow lace on the wallin my brain, a playground full of jetstream blown sideways in a gentle curl

Posted on Wednesday, 25 January 2012 by Karen Christopher

I went out looking for yellow

A collection of yellow to remind me that what I set out to look for tends to be what I see.

Work-in-progress: So Below

Yesterday, 20 November, we performed a work-in-progress of So Below at 3pm at Chelsea Theatre. We had a great audience with plenty of people staying for the post-show discussion. Many people gave helpful feedback. Joe Kelleher was there and said, among other things, something about parallax and I wrote that down “Parallax” and I asked, what do you mean by that? and he explained, but afterwards when I tried to remember what he said (because it did something in my brain) I couldn’t. I checked my notes and it just says “parallax.” I looked it up.